HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement by Sylvia Cranston is the first large-scale biography written about her by a well-known author. Cranston, who has also written several books about reincarnation, credits Madame Blavatsky with the introduction of Eastern religious and spiritual thinking to the Western world.
In addition, her own psychic powers attracted attention. She understood how to manifest phenomena through the power of her will, and this led her to discredit much of the spiritualism which had gained popularity during the 1870s, especially in America. Others in turn discounted HPB's writings by calling her a plagiarist and a fraud, so that she has often been portrayed as a charlatan.
Sylvia Cranston sets the record straight with her scholarly work, which took fourteen years to research and write. Some of her source materials were translated from Russian for the first time for the book, which pieces together the events of HPB's life's work and shows how it has influenced poets, philosophers and scientists for over a century.
What was HPB like as a person? Dubbed "the Sphinx" from one photograph in which her eyes look intently at the viewer, she also had a fun-loving, lighter side. Especially in her youth she had an active social life, loving to dance and attend parties, engage in witty conversation, joke, tease, and create a commotion. She was born in 1831 in the Ukraine, to Peter von Hahn, captain of a horse artillery battery, and Helena Andreyevna, a feminist and outstanding novelist. HPB's family moved often, and Helena and her younger sister Vera received the education of Russian nobility, supervised by their maternal grandmother, Princess Helena Pavlovna Dolgorukov.
By the age of 16, HPB had become preoccupied with the mystical books she found in her grandfather's library. At 17 she married Nikifor Blavatsky, a state official. HPB realized her impending marriage was a mistake, but was not able to stop the ceremony. She refused to grant "nuptial rights" and escaped from her husband with the intention of traveling back to her family. En route, she befriended a Russian lady of her acquaintance, and began her world travels by visiting Egypt, Greece and Eastern Europe. Being a married woman, she discovered, gave her new status and independence, because single women of her class were kept under the strict surveillance of governesses.
Throughout the book there are glimpses of adventure and hardship. There are references to HPB being wounded during the Crimean War, and to the fact that many times during her life she became very ill and close to death.
Cranston reports on numerous voyages HPB undertook during her 20s and 30s, including visits to America, Canada, South America, Ladakh, Tibet, Burma, and, via Java, Europe, where she stayed in France and Germany. She then returned to Russia.
Helena Blavatsky first briefly saw "M", her spiritual Master, on her 20th birthday in London, England, recognizing him from previous dreams. Cranston presents assorted evidence which pieces together HPB's subsequent stays in India, Tibet and Kashmir, where she stayed with Mahatma Koot Hoomi (KH), and met with her own Master Morya, who did not live there but traveled constantly. Both of these teachers, HPB explained, rarely came out into the world openly, but could project their form anywhere.
"KH's home was a large wooden building in the Chinese fashion, pagoda-like, between a lake and a beautiful mountain," wrote HPB in a letter. Much of her time there was spent learning English as well as Senzar, a secret sacerdotal language, the "mystery speech" of the initiated adepts all over the world. HPB, who was fluent in French, had learned only limited conversational English. Yet it would be part of her life's work to render the subtleties of esoteric philosophy and metaphysics into English.
HPB's knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism was greater than was then available to the public or to Western scholars, and she was also familiar with esoteric Buddhist practices. This knowledge was corroborated by Dr. D.T. Suzuki, who brought Zen Buddhism to the West in the next century and who stated that "undoubtedly, Madame Blavatsky had in some way been initiated into the deeper side of Mahayana teaching."
During her 30s, after a physical and psychic crisis, HPB gained full control over her occult powers. In her youth, "phenomena" had often just happened around her, and her family grew used to "raps" or loud noises, the inexplicable movement of furniture and of objects through walls, the unopened letters which she would read verbatim, and so forth. Reading people's minds, she explained, she always did in full consciousness, simply by watching their thoughts as they evolved out of their heads, in a spiral of luminous smoke or radiant material which settled in distinct pictures and images around them.
It was in the last two decades of her life, in her 40s and 50s, that Blavatsky accomplished her public work, guiding the development of the Theosophical Society in the USA, India and England; publishing two magazines, The Theosophist and Lucifer, and writing her major works, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine.
In 1873 she went to New York on her Master's instructions, staying in the US for four years and becoming an American citizen. Here, with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and William Q. Judge and others, she founded the Theosophical Society, which had the following objectives:
1. to form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color;
2. to study ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, and the demonstration of the importance of such study; and
3. to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers latent in man.
Heyday of Spiritualism
HPB arrived in New York in the heyday of spiritualism. Initially she championed the spiritualist cause publicly, giving testimony to "spirit-forms" and gaining a blaze of publicity. She acknowledged that in some instances there are "truly wonderful phenomena of a higher order, in which undeniable intelligence and knowledge are exhibited," due to the activity of the higher self of the sensitive. Most mediumship, however, she discredited, such as that involved in the materialization of the dead, asserting that it is the thoughts of the sitters which attract to the medium the disintegrating astral remains of the deceased, cast off by the soul. Phenomena such as ringing bells and thought reading, taps, physical manifestations and levitations, she claimed, can be created at will without the help of any spirits at all.
HPB considered her life work "the thankless task of convincing people of other planes of existence," and she gave proof of her own control over the forces of nature to many who came to see her. Many of her visitors, however, not ready to understand occult science, saw only the superficial, which did attract attention, but also misinterpretation. She considered it her "most sacred duty to unveil what spiritualism is and expose what it is not." But when she began to write about the danger of mediumship, the spiritualist newspapers conducted a vindictive smear campaign against her character, which they carried on for years thereafter.
In 1888, three years before her death, HPB concluded in the magazine Lucifer that the occult phenomena and manifestations had been misunderstood and misrepresented both as to their nature and their purpose. At best, it had been hoped that intelligent people, including scientists, would recognize the existence of a new an deeply interesting field of inquiry and research when they witnessed physical effects, produced at will, for which they could not account. Instead, these phenomena remained in the realm of miracles and superstition rather than being considered "scientific effects" as HPB had hoped.
Nevertheless, HPB was able to attract people of the stature of Thomas Edison to the Theosophical movement while she was in the U.S., and in India, her work reintroduced figures like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to their traditional teachings. At a time when the Indian elite studied at English universities, often denying the value of their own centuries-old traditions, it was contact with HPB that inspired them to study works such as the Bhagavad Gita for the first time.
Towards the last decade of her life, HPB became increasingly reclusive, focusing on writing and teaching while fighting ill health. Isis Unveiled, her first major work, published in two volumes in 1877, concerned the fundamental propositions of oriental philosophy. It was an instant success, a thousand copies being sold within 10 days of publication. The book had been written in the U.S. while she was staying with Professor Corson at Cornell University, who reported:
"She had a profound knowledge of everything, and her method of work was most unusual. She would write in bed, from nine o'clock in the morning, smoking innumerable cigarettes, quoting long verbatim paragraphs from dozens of books of which I am perfectly certain there were no copies at that time in America, translating easily from several languages, and occasionally calling out to me in my study to know how to turn some old-world idiom into literary English, for at that time she had not attained the literary fluency of diction which distinguished The Secret Doctrine. According to others, HPB did use books wherever available, but those which were not "she drew from the Astral Light, or from her adept teachers, or by using her soul senses."
London became the center of the Theosophical Society in 1887, and HPB kept up a heavy work load. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy was published in two volumes in 1888. The first volume, Cosmogenesis, describes how worlds originate and are reborn and how our globe and its kingdoms evolved up to the time the human form was developed. Anthropogenesis, the second volume, discussed the awakening of mind by the incarnation of human souls from prior worlds, the subsequent evolution of the early races, and the future development projected for those races.
HPB next founded the Esoteric School, and published The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence. She died in 1891 in London after becoming quite frail and often unable to walk.
On her passing, the London Review of Reviews wrote: "What Madame Blavatsky did was an immeasurably greater thing than the doubling of teacups. She made it possible for the most cultivated and skeptical men and women of this generation to believe...that not only does the invisible world that encompasses us contain intelligences vastly superior to our own knowledge of the truth, but that it is possible for man to enter into communion with these hidden and silent ones, and to be taught by them the Divine mysteries of Time and Eternity."
Cranston documents the effect of The Secret Doctrine over the last century in the fields of science, literature and art. HPB was the first person aggressively to argue the case against a rising Darwinian consensus, because Darwin's work omitted the mental, creative, and visionary life of the human race. Cranston demonstrates how HPB's work shows foreknowledge of 20th century science, from radiant matter to the infinite divisibility and perpetual motion of the atom, to the concept that matter and energy are convertible. It is reported that Einstein had a copy of The Secret Doctrine on his desk.
Among those influenced by HPB's work in the arts are W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, L. Frank Baum, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Paul Gauguin, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, and Alexander Scriabin.
Sylvia Cranston's work gives testimony to HPB's stature and influence. Her colorful life challenged both the social conventions and the entrenched intellectual orthodoxies of the age. In Blavatsky's own words, found on her desk after her death: "There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind -- but yet a road; and it leads to the Heart of the Universe. I can tell you how to find Those who will show you the secret gateway that leads inward only.... For those who win onwards, there is reward past all telling: the power to bless and save humanity. For those who fail, there are other lives in which success may come."
The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement by Sylvia L. Cranston was published in 1993 by J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. 648 pages.)
Published with the permission of Share International.