Blavatsky Unveiled.

HI ATS,

There have been Theosophists around lately. They aren't easy to identify at first. That may, in part, have to do with the fact that there are many shades of Theosophy with many prolific writers as members.

Theosophy is serious business. It is rigid and inflexible and tough, like its founder. Its potential for impacting the hearts and minds of man should not be underestimated. Theosophy has a tendency to encourage some of the less savory aspects of mankind and it needs to be leavened, wherever its presence has made an impact.

It is in that spirit, ATS, that I offer you this thread.

You see, it all starts with this lady...

Helena Hahn was born in 1831, the daughter of a Russian Military officer in the town of Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine. It is known that at the age age 16 she married Russian general Nikifor Blavatsky who was 25 years her senior. She very soon left Nikifor, retaining the noble Russian surname, 'Blavatsky'. She then claims to have traveled to Constantinople, and other exotic locations such as Tibet. We will come later to the many things that Helena claimed about herself, but for now, let's look at what wedo know about the life of Helena Blavatsky before she began to instruct the world in the 'mysteries' of Theosophy.

It is known that she was a bare-back rider in the circus. Helena was said to have also been a piano teacher in Paris and that she managed an artificial flower factory in a town called Tiflis. It is also said that she had become the traveling companion for a while to a wealthy heiress and it is thought that that was where she had gotten initial exposure to many of the books that we will find her to have plagiarized. But probably her most important job, and the one we are most concerned with, is Helena's job working as the assistant to famous English 'Spiritist' Daniel Dunglas Home (20 March 1833 – 21 June 1886).

It needs to be realized that 'Spiritism was all the rage at this time in Britain and Europe and the Scottish medium Daniel Home was like a rock star of spiritists in his time. I won't go too deeply in to it, but it began with a couple of twelve year old girls called the Fox Twins that seemed to be haunted by 'knocks' they claimed were made by spirits. This happened in 1848 and England was never the same: Europe went 'Spirit Medium' crazy. You know, Harlem Shake? Like that, only no YouTube and totally word of mouth like mass hysteria; it went viral.

And guess who was there to try and capitalize on what had really been her childhood dream? Why, Helena would be; and she would do so by sheer force of cantankerous bad-tempered will-power. Make no mistake, Helena was a tough gritty survivor. At the age of 40 she was one of 17 survivors that swam through carnage to safety when the ship Eumonia exploded on it's way from Italy to Greece. She was a committed chain smoker and smoked prodigious amounts of marijuana, which was legal at the time. She has been quoted as saying that sexual love is 'a beastly appetite that should be starved into submission.'(TOaH. P. 377).

Helena ultimately moved to America and, with others, created Theosophy, and we will get to that soon. But first we want to look at Helena's terrible track record as any sort of medium.Helena was chased out of Cairo, Egypt in 1872 when one of the attendees at one of her seances found the stuffed white glove that she used to 'materialise' the spirits. She was known to have bludgeoned an attendant at one of her demonstrations of psychic power with a torrent of profanity when the person pointed out that the tea-cup she had materialised might have been previously buried. Another story tells of how she used her psychic powers to find the broach of a lost heiress. The heiress did not believe that Helena had actually found the broach and Helena was still protesting her innocence when the pawn broker's receipt for the broach that she had returned was shown to her.

The Society for Psychical Research investigated Helena and produced a 200 page report, called the Hodgson Report, in which the main investigator referred to Helena as, "...one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history". In the report Hodgson revealed many of the trick methods that Helena used to perform feats such as materialising 'messages' from her connection to the 'Hidden masters', Coot Hoomi from the ceiling. Hodgson travelled to India to investigate Helena and crew and even found fresh plaster where holes in ceilings and walls had been hastily plastered up to hide the props and trap doors used to simulate the presence of spirits and there appearance and dis-appearance.

If readers will just take a brief look at the wave of popular 'Spiritist' culture of the time, they will understand more readily what the hell was going on back then and why people might believe stuff like floating dis-embodied heads and messages from the spirit realm in the forms of slips of paper from the ceiling.

In the posts that will follow this one, we are going to take a look at Helena in America and how Theosophy came to be. but before we do, I want to advance forward a bit to how Helena was able to establish herself so quickly in the States.

Helena's first job in America was as a ghost writer. It's as simple as that. Now, don't get me wrong, it was by her own pluck that she made what she was writing so attractive to an obviously hungry audience that they were willing to pay for it; but that's how she first started to make a living. She wrote 'messages' from the 'Ascended Masters' in Tibet, and from an imaginary 'Brotherhood of Luxor' in Egypt to the hungry fans of a newsletter called The Banner of Light which was published by American Hon. Henry Steel Olcott. Just to be clear: she was paid by Olcott to provide material for his newsletter which was in turn paid for by a large audience hungry for secrets and mysteries.

She did, in fact, become a professional writer.

Were are going there very soon.



Citations:

The Occult: A History. Colin Wilson. 1971

An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. James Randi.

www.randi.org...

reply to post by Bybyots


So, not only was she a gold-digger, a carny, and an opportunist riding the spiritualist wave, she was also a professional writer.

And, given her heritage and her aspirations, it comes as no surprise that she should have stumbled across the most convincing case for class hatred ever devised:

Tibetan Buddhism.

"You deserve your oppression, due to the sins you can't remember committing."

How f'ing convenient.

But there's so much worse than class hatred infecting her work...

I await your expose with baited breath....
What a character......it seems the last century or two have been peopled with so many that became rather larger than life.
I certainly think the trend may continue.........Oh the scoundrels as yet unborn!

reply to post by Bybyots



Well you're right, there has been peddling of the same old in a re-packaged Initiat(iv)e, and you're also right in that it tends to bring out the worst in people...knowledge as power and all that.

reply to post by Madrusa


Knowledge is a standing wave.

One's congenital character defects notwithstanding.

Ahh Madame Blavatsky... Thank you for the breath of fresh air OP!

Killer thread! Bumpity. I had NO idea Blavatsky was an asst. to Home. How freaking fascinating. Looking forward to more, Bybyots!

reply to post by Bybyots


I liked this thread. Good read. I say, "Know them by their fruit." Theosophy is based on what Enoch called the worthless mysteries. The Mystery School is based on copying and twisting the true mystery of God found in scripture. Theosophy is the extreme of this practice. A few years ago, I could see how the Mystery School religion was twisting and counterfeiting the true mystery of scripture. I went on a quest to read as much of the material as possible so I could write articles twisting the truth back to its origin. What I came to find is that much of the knowledge they are seeing is not twisted by them as much as it is twisted by their mindset.

Most of these people--the ones not trying to make a buck from their game--are sincerely trying to find truth. The trouble comes in the approach. Truth is not bought or sold. It is a gift. It can only be granted and imparted. The reception of truth comes by the practice of virtue. Apart from following a narrow path, side roads and alleyways entrap the mind in a hall of mystical mirrors. This is where the mystery school leads the mind. One mirror reflects the next with no exit. In the end, the only exit is giving over taking and placing the will in alignment with God's will. God can only give. Only a thief takes and the difference between the two wills becomes the fruit we bear.

Originally posted by The GUT
Killer thread! Bumpity. I had NO idea Blavatsky was an asst. to Home.

Eh, sure you did.

The Lucis Trust, unfortunately, isn't a popular myth. She assisted any number of bassackwards attempts to accelerate human development. And, vitally, she wasn't alone.

And isn't still.

The problem with her sort of exceptionalism is that it discards a ridiculously large proportion of the general population. Exceptionalism isn't sustainable.

Raise the general tone, or perish/regress in the fallout.

Everyone can be reached, but you only need to touch about 20% of your audience.

reply to post by Eidolon23

And, given her heritage and her aspirations, it comes as no surprise that she should have stumbled across the most convincing case for class hatred ever devised:

Tibetan Buddhism.

Indeed. Tibet was always a sad case; a true horror-frappe' of feudalism and religion hidden back in those mountains.

It's not easy for folks to make that connection between Theosophy, Tibet and fascism; I think that was very astute of you.

Years ago i read of her exploits in India one of which she made live roses to fall from the cieling, forming them with the power of her inent.....presumably, for the audience....
I forget the debunkers name, but he called her on it after the lecture of saeance and asked for one for himself as a keepsake, to which she obliged by providing him with one falling from the ceiling
I always wondered how she did that one.....

Thanks everyone,

I think that we are all on the same sheet of music here and can just hang and talk about this. I'm personally really confused as to why folks insist on favoring a story that places them in a rigid caste system. It's not bad enough that there be the caste systems that we impose on ourselves, but there are folks that seem to be able to notice the propensity that human beings have for this sort of behaviour, and they leverage that to help impose and encourage the same for people's spiritual lives.

I would like to talk about that stuff. But I feel that it needs to be securely ensconced in the realm of writing. In other words; we have to be aware at all times that it is just a story, it's just writing that is being contributed to, and revised and edited.

What's profound about it though is that it's very real, it's truly the stories of our lives. They are the driving force behind everything that we do.

The stories are truly what makes us uniquely human.

Mida. Think about this: You start telling yourself a story way before you start really employing your thumb when you first get up in the morning. Even if it's about how you are going to get a cup of joe.

The stories matter. The stories that folks align themselves with matter.

I am not personally going to live contribute to another 100 years of darkness at the hands of Blavatsky's, Besant and Bailey's story. It's blatantly counterproductive to us breaking the cycle that has kept us down for so long, and directly contributes to keeping Man firmly strapped down and shackled, facing the wall in Plato's Cave watching an endless procession of shadows.

So? Part 2 tomorrow?

Helena Blavatsky was 42ish when she finally made it to America. It was 1873 and, being as cultural idioms are always a bit delayed in being relayed from Britain to America, she found an America that was deep in the throes of the 'Spiritism' craze, 25 years after the Fox Twins started hearing knocks.

The difference that Helena found when she reached the states was that this was spiritism 'American Style'. Spiritists in the U.S. had brought Yankee-know-how and ingenuity to the game and simply put, it was like spiritism on steroids. The gadgetry was much better, and is responsible for much of our modern pop-culture appreciation of seances and mediums from the turn of the century before last, with dis-embodied trumpets and violins being played, and floating furniture and hovering tables and the like.

Helena moved to Chittenden, Vermont, and it was there that she met Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott was a lawyer that specialized in fraud and his first introduction to spiritists came when he investigated the Eddy Brothers and their claims of psychism. He and Helena hit it off immediately and Olcott became her main financial support, calling upon her to help in his fraud investigations, including the Katie King case. It seemed Olcott and Blavatsky applied a little 'scorched-earth' policy before embarking on their first attempt to garner the attention of a public hungry for the mysterious, The Miracle Club.

The Miracle Club lasted about a week and a half, but at one of the meetings the industrious pair gave the floor to some guy that had a mathematical theory about the pyramids. Olcott, Blavatsky and others, decided that there should be a study group for such things, and that is, essentially, where Theosophy began. It was during this developmental period that Helena wrote the 'messages' from the ascended masters to fulfill the eager questions of the readers of Olcott's Banner of Light newsletter. Olcott believed wholeheartedly in the messages from the ascended masters; and he followed their advice when they told him to leave his wife and move in with Blavatsky so that they could more efficiently combine their efforts.

About a week in to this whole new head of steam, the previous debunkers of spiritists came up with a name for their new 'group', Theosophy, and Helena set about to furiously write out their first best seller. It is said that she was at it day and night, parsing her library of texts, chain-smoking like a chief. In 1877 she published Isis Unveiled, which did remarkably well in sales.

And that's all we really have, short of the final act of Theosophy while it was in the hands of Blavatsky.

I'll get that up, A.S.A.P.

reply to post by Bybyots


Hey Dude, kinda pushed for time here so not much time to read and process right now and i'm just stopping by to bump and maybe add another avenue for exploration before i delve into the op etc.... i've spent the last ten years working in an Anthroposophical organisation (i was a total outsider to this group upon joining).
For those who do not know, Anthroposophy is the society founded by Rudolph Steiner after he split from Blavatsky and is best known to many for Steiner/Waldorf education and schools.
It's a curious thing... i found it very interesting on many fronts though never joined "The Society" and recently left them as employers, partly as i was sick to death of their piety and dogmatic approach to Steiner himself - imo it paints itself as an openminded, broadranging group but is really quite a narrow cult of personality which is a great shame considering *some* of what the prolific Steiner has talked and written about - i dont feel that RS himself would have intended this group to be quite so "set" and inflexible to growth and change.
I have found Steiner (who was most likely influenced more by Goethe than Blavatsky, particularly in the long term) a very interesting character - in some ways an inspired figure with real insights into education, natural and "mystical" sciences, agriculture (the organic movement owes him a massive debt), the arts and the therapeutic approach to learning difficulties and mental illness that i have worked deeply and very successfully with. On the other hand he believed he was chanelling the Akashic record, and his numerous lectures on the Rudolph Steiner online library are a fascinating, dense and often raised eyebrow inducing read. I've had the chance to discuss many of the ideas and interpretions with various anthro doctors/philosophers etc and have often disagreed strongly though cordially with them, as well as often being enlightened by them in ways.
I'm starting to ramble, oops. i guess my aim is to suport what you say about their toughness and inflexibility, as i regard them as another group of Theosophists.... there are many fine and compassionate people within this group and i benefitted personally in many ways intellectually in my time there but it's also constricting - it provides many tools for examining the world and ourselves but imo has no wish itself to grow and expand it's thinking or approach outside of it's pre-defined boundaries. For a group that supposedly wishes to have a positive influence on society via improving education, nutrition, ethics and so forth i found it to be a series of isolated centres of activity, largely alone in their local settings and only interacting with other schools, churches and farms in the society.
lol, this has been therapeuitc to write and i'm gonna stop myself before i blather on too much, i'll return later to digest the op properly, and expand on anything i've written if requested to do so.

jolly interesting thread and a nice alternative to an increasingly political ats

ETA: gah, freaking laptop. i lost a comment i really liked, basicly that The Anthro Society is a rosicrusian-hermetic artsy fartsy hippy mystical christian mash up of (largely) amazingly unstoned peeps. i needed to say that as it really helped

and Eurythmy... oh.my.days.... it's a distilled expression of the above and i dare folk to watch it and either fail to laugh or fall asleep.

i'm going now before i wrote a few pages more and start to foam at the mouth more than i already am

meh, double post

reply to post by skalla


Thanks so much for that skalla,

This was my favorite part...

ETA: gah, freaking laptop. i lost a comment i really liked, basicly that The Anthro Society is a rosicrusian-hermetic artsy fartsy hippy mystical christian mash up of (largely) amazingly unstoned peeps. i needed to say that as it really helped

Yeah, I have been around the block a few times, and there is nothing more refreshing, after slogging through the gutters, than to find the groups that are not blowing their brains out with D and A. I was always partial towards the B.O.T.A. for that very reason.

I was wondering if you might have learned anything about The 8th Sphere?

Thanks for coming by, it's always so good to see you.

reply to post by Bybyots


The Eighth Sphere was referenced at times in some of our rather way out training and away days etc (though i can share nothing in the way of personal knowledge of this), but i "found my own resistance" as such when opportunities came to join The Society, largely due to the cult of personality thing and my own autodidactic belligerence - i never read a single Steiner book either though i have read a great many of his lectures via The Steiner Online Archive for example, but i really quite objected to the narrow church approach which seemed to conflict with what should have been a broader consideration of ideas and influences - far too set in it's ways for my liking.... the only non directly anthro thinker who was really accepted by the various US and UK anthro "doctors/scientists/thinkers" was Goethe for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent Joseph Campbell.

I came across this though that may be of interest... My role being what it was, a lot of my own exposure to anthro training was based around therapeutic approaches and such towards autism, observation, craft work, self examination and "goethean science" etc. Much of it was fascinating, some of it though required the "dont say no, just say oh!" approach. The sad thing was their unwillingness to apply that maxim to "outside" influence.

I learned and grew a lot in my time there however, but needed to leave before that process began to contract... ime a lot of great folk in Anthroposophy pretty much end up becoming a homogenous mass which becomes overly worthy and quite boring in the end, however much i enjoyed being part of a mystically oriented community.

The link to a fascistic approach is "nice" to see discussed, and i obseved that tendency amongst a number of those higher up in the grouping - they can be quite ruthless and dictatorial. One non anthro who was an influential part this particular organisation remarked that we would all be having Steiner/Waldorf Ed if we had lost WW2, though i feel he was being needlessly controversial as afaik "Ze Nazis" really did not get along with the Anthros as qwell as some would like us to believe - many of them are pretty much mystical christian anarcho agrarian commune loving types, or something like that.

Very cool thread and it's been nice to share some of my own feelings and observations of an experience that both i loved and found infinately annoying

www.lucistrust.org...

reply to post by skalla
Fascinating observations, Skalla!

Speaking of anthroposophy, it's maybe interesting to note that J. Allen Hynek was a big fan of Rudolph Steiner. I don't want to try and turn this into a UFO thread, but I wonder what might be made of that considering the alleged "automatic writing/channelling" done by Blavatsky?

Looking a little more into that lecture i posted in my previous reply, i now know why The Eighth Sphere rang some bells as it was ref'd in a series of seminars i attended with Doctor James Dyson (not the vaccuum cleaner dude) where we had an extended disagreement over an anthroposophical account of the development of the earth, evolution and so forth - the eighth sphere was a part of that but i was too busy explaining to him why he was wrong during a very polite ding-dong for us to go into that. Jolly nice chap and we met and enjoyed each others company while disagreeing a number of times, but at his age the quicksilva baseball caps and leather jacket seemed oddly incongruous, paricularly with his sandals and socks.

Anthros