Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. In our episode on Joaquin Torres Garcia this week,
Speaker 1: we talked about Patam Blovotsky and how she just seems
Speaker 1: to keep showing up in our episodes in unexpected moments.
Speaker 1: So today our episode on her is our Saturday Classic.
Speaker 1: This originally came out on October fifth, twenty twenty, so enjoy.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, it's the best
Speaker 1: month of the year. I know it's your absolute favorite.
Speaker 1: It is. I mean, I in my heart it's October
Speaker 1: every day, but now we're actually in October, which means
Speaker 1: Halloween e content. And for this October we're doing kind
Speaker 1: of an on ramp topic because it's a subject that
Speaker 1: I know you and I have both been kind of
Speaker 1: mentally prowling around for a bit. It is Madame Blavatsky,
Speaker 1: who is said to have gone simply by her initials
Speaker 1: of HPB. I have a hard time saying that, so
Speaker 1: I'm going to stick to her regular name. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and it's also like the name she was known by
Speaker 1: in all of her work around the English speaking world.
Speaker 1: We're not going to try to like recreate her Russian
Speaker 1: name in Russian because that's not how she was known here, right,
Speaker 1: And Blavatsky is a figure that is iconic in a
Speaker 1: number of ways. She was the founder of the theosophical movement.
Speaker 1: She lived of a life of adventure that is hard,
Speaker 1: very hard to believe. Frankly, we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about the likely embellishment of some of her life story,
Speaker 1: and you could also make the case that she, in
Speaker 1: many ways set the image that persists to this day
Speaker 1: in pop culture of the fortune teller, clad in flowing
Speaker 1: garments and fringe. She tended to play up her otherness
Speaker 1: as she traveled through the world to make a name
Speaker 1: for herself and to make a living. She is a
Speaker 1: polarizing figure to this day. There are still people that
Speaker 1: are scholars of her work, and still people that are
Speaker 1: very vested in disproving her work. But the important thing
Speaker 1: is that the impact of her work is still felt
Speaker 1: in the world, whether you believe her to have been
Speaker 1: a genuine mystic or a total fraud. So we are
Speaker 1: tackling Madam Blovotsky after many years of kind of looking
Speaker 1: at it and then being like later, later, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: And then also when we were we have each had
Speaker 1: time away from the office recently, and it was like
Speaker 1: we were trying to get a handle on what was
Speaker 1: coming up on the show. So one of us didn't
Speaker 1: do the same thing as the other one while the
Speaker 1: other one was out and not reachable, and you sent
Speaker 1: me your list over and I was like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: so glad this is finally on there. Well, and it
Speaker 1: worked out well because you know, this is a it's
Speaker 1: a longer episode, in part because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: her story for her and her life is in some
Speaker 1: ways well documented in other ways very fuzzily documented. Picking
Speaker 1: it apart is quite tricky. But I also wanted to
Speaker 1: try to read as many different sources and biographies as
Speaker 1: I could, because, as we know, and we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: some will be favorable to a subject, some will not,
Speaker 1: some will fall in the middle, and you kind of
Speaker 1: have to develop a sense of pattern recognition to see
Speaker 1: like what is consistent biography to biography and what seems
Speaker 1: like biographer bias, and so in her case, that's a
Speaker 1: really big part of the research is just kind of
Speaker 1: trying to suss out the bias versus the actual Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm literally putting your quotes around actual facts because you'll
Speaker 1: see it starts right from the beginning. The life of
Speaker 1: Madame Blovotsky was just a tangle of intensity right from
Speaker 1: her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von Hahn in
Speaker 1: what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She was born
Speaker 1: August twelfth, eighteen thirty one, and she was born prematurely
Speaker 1: in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so that's already
Speaker 1: a lot. Elena's mother, Elena andreaev navon Hahn, was still
Speaker 1: a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth,
Speaker 1: and both of them were not expected to live. A
Speaker 1: priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before
Speaker 1: she was expected to die, and so then Elena's aunt Nadya,
Speaker 1: who was also a child at the time, accidentally set
Speaker 1: the priest robes on fire with a candle that she
Speaker 1: was holding. This is so much in a birth story, right,
Speaker 1: There's just a lot going on. Elena's German father, Peter
Speaker 1: von Hahn, was a captain in the Royal Horse Artillery.
Speaker 1: He was in Poland when all of this happened, so
Speaker 1: he missed all of the you know, sort of grave happenings,
Speaker 1: but also the wackiness with the child setting a priest
Speaker 1: on fire. Accidentally, he actually did not meet his daughter
Speaker 1: for six months to a year, depending on the source
Speaker 1: you look at. Accounts swerve around quite a bit on
Speaker 1: that point. So of course she did not die in infancy.
Speaker 1: She was also descended from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess
Speaker 1: Elena Pavlovna Delgerikov, and defied convention of the day. She
Speaker 1: educated herself in everything from Greek language to botany. Helena's
Speaker 1: seventeen year old mother also survived the delivery and became
Speaker 1: a novelist shortly after that. Sometimes she's been called the
Speaker 1: Russian Jorge Sound because of the similarity of the themes
Speaker 1: in her work to that of our previous podcast subject.
Speaker 1: So young Elena grew up in a household of women
Speaker 1: who really valued writing and learning. Yeah, her mother's novels
Speaker 1: are largely about women who are in marriages that do
Speaker 1: not hold enough romance or happiness for them. Much a
Speaker 1: lot of Shorge sounds work. But though Elena was born
Speaker 1: into the aristocracy and had really positive role models, in
Speaker 1: terms of education for women. Elena's life as a child
Speaker 1: was not really what you would call idyllic. Her father's
Speaker 1: military career meant that they moved frequently, and there are
Speaker 1: wildly different assessments of what her relationship with her mother
Speaker 1: was like. Some indicate that the elder Elena was generally
Speaker 1: unhappy with her life and the constant moving, and would
Speaker 1: have been very pleased to just break free of her
Speaker 1: family obligations entirely. Other accounts suggest that mother and daughter
Speaker 1: were in fact quite close. At one point, Peter's orders
Speaker 1: took the family to Saint Petersburg, and the elder Elena
Speaker 1: was finally happy, so much so that when the orders
Speaker 1: came to leave, she refused to go. The von Hans
Speaker 1: were separated for a while during this period, though she
Speaker 1: did take her two daughters on a thousand mile journey
Speaker 1: with their grandfather to Ostrakhan, which was at the mouth
Speaker 1: of the Vulgar River. The family patriarch was traveling for work,
Speaker 1: and the young Helena was exposed to Tibetan Buddhism there
Speaker 1: for the first time. Later in life, she would describe
Speaker 1: this as having made a really lasting impression on her.
Speaker 1: Yeah I didn't dig into it here, but most biographers
Speaker 1: make the point of like, her mother was so happy
Speaker 1: to be in a city and in Saint Petersburg that
Speaker 1: she refused to move with her father. But then she
Speaker 1: took her kids out of Saint Petersburg and went on
Speaker 1: what was actually a very long, arduous journey. So it
Speaker 1: kind of points to the fact that maybe she just
Speaker 1: didn't want to be with Peter, she maybe wanted to
Speaker 1: break Yeah. By the time Elena was nine, her parents
Speaker 1: were back together and the family was then living in Odessa.
Speaker 1: But at this point the elder Helena, who had never
Speaker 1: really enjoyed robust health, was sick and she was getting worse.
Speaker 1: When she was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis during a pregnancy,
Speaker 1: A doctor moved in with the family full time, and
Speaker 1: that baby, a son named Leonid, was born in ga
Speaker 1: eighteen forty, and he was actually the family's second son.
Speaker 1: They had had a boy named Sasha, who had died
Speaker 1: in infancy several years earlier. And you may have noticed
Speaker 1: that we referenced two daughters a little bit ago, and
Speaker 1: that's because at that point there was already a second daughter.
Speaker 1: Her name was Vera, and Helena Andreevna survived the birth
Speaker 1: of her fourth child despite her illness, but despite every
Speaker 1: treatment that the family's wealth and connections could arrange for her,
Speaker 1: she did not live a whole lot longer. She died
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty two at the age of just twenty eight,
Speaker 1: and in an apocryphal story, her last words to her
Speaker 1: daughter were that she would not live a life like
Speaker 1: other women and that she would suffer a great deal,
Speaker 1: so something that Blovotsky would say throughout her life. Helena,
Speaker 1: her sister Vera, and her brother Leonid were sent to
Speaker 1: live with their grandparents. That sort of tropy sentiment that
Speaker 1: Helena was not like other girls was something that was
Speaker 1: really part of the way the family described her from
Speaker 1: her youth. Her sister Vera described her as being singularly strange,
Speaker 1: and most descriptions talk about her having a duality to
Speaker 1: her personality. On the one hand, she was really rebellious
Speaker 1: and stubborn and liked to play unkind pranks and kind
Speaker 1: of talk back to adults, and on the other she
Speaker 1: was bookish, deeply interested in the metaphysical, and really obsessed
Speaker 1: with hiding in the many tunnels and other strange hideaways
Speaker 1: that were part of their grandparents' house in the city
Speaker 1: of Saratov on the Vulgar River, and this is also
Speaker 1: the point in the timeline where the stories of her
Speaker 1: unusual paranormal abilities are rooted. So, according to family stories,
Speaker 1: which are of course not verifiable, Helena would play with
Speaker 1: what seemed to be ghosts, and she would sleep walk
Speaker 1: into the unused passages of the house and developed the
Speaker 1: ability to put birds to sleep using something that she
Speaker 1: called Solomon's wisdom. We don't know what that was. There
Speaker 1: is literally nothing that tries to explain what Solomon's wisdom was,
Speaker 1: and of course the fa lore around Helena mentions her
Speaker 1: fascination with the dead from the time she was a child.
Speaker 1: Once the children had relocated to Saratov and were just
Speaker 1: not constantly moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore,
Speaker 1: their education settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But
Speaker 1: even so, and in spite of coming from a pretty
Speaker 1: progressive family in terms of women in education, this was
Speaker 1: largely about preparing her to be an aristocratic wife. So
Speaker 1: she was learning French, studying art and music, but things
Speaker 1: like math and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope,
Speaker 1: she was supposed to learn how to be very pretty
Speaker 1: and quiet and to be able to entertain her husband
Speaker 1: with talks of culture, but not really anything else. And
Speaker 1: there are a lot of stories of the ways in
Speaker 1: which Helena in her early years comes into contact with
Speaker 1: the occult and the mystical, just before her own deeper
Speaker 1: connection to that world world is said to have manifested.
Speaker 1: So she allegedly learned about b communication and plants that
Speaker 1: had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as
Speaker 1: a surf on the family property. His name is listed
Speaker 1: as baronig Buyak, and while traveling with her grandparents, she
Speaker 1: was again exposed to a number of other cultures and
Speaker 1: ideas and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism
Speaker 1: in particular. She also started to mention a protector that
Speaker 1: she saw in her dreams during her late childhood, and
Speaker 1: she described this protector, which was her name for him,
Speaker 1: as a tall man from India. There were several accidents
Speaker 1: that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury,
Speaker 1: and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention
Speaker 1: of this protector figure yeah in one instance, she had
Speaker 1: stacked a table with other furniture and climbed it to
Speaker 1: get a look at a portrait that was high on
Speaker 1: the wall of her grandparents home. There's a whole layer
Speaker 1: to this story where the portrait is covered with a
Speaker 1: curtain and nobody wants anybody to see it, and so
Speaker 1: that makes it more alluring, and we don't ever find
Speaker 1: out what the portrait is. But when she peeked behind
Speaker 1: it to the forbidden painting, whatever it was was either
Speaker 1: so shocking or startling that she passed out and fell
Speaker 1: from this giant stack of furniture. And she claimed that
Speaker 1: when she came to everything was back where it belonged.
Speaker 1: All of the furniture had been put back in its
Speaker 1: proper place, and the only evidence of her clandestine climb
Speaker 1: was a handprint that she had left high on the
Speaker 1: wall on a dusty surface. And then on another occasion,
Speaker 1: she was thrown from a horse, and she said that
Speaker 1: her protector had appeared and saved her by holding her
Speaker 1: head so it did not impact on the ground. There's
Speaker 1: also a sort of incongruous piece of travel information that
Speaker 1: comes up around the same time that she started seeing
Speaker 1: this protector. Later in life, she mentioned having gone to
Speaker 1: England with her father when she was twelve or thirteen.
Speaker 1: There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated
Speaker 1: by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend
Speaker 1: to be of two views on this sort of strange
Speaker 1: standout piece in the whole Madame Blovotsky puzzle. Either it
Speaker 1: never happened, or it happened, but she recalled the timeline incorrectly,
Speaker 1: and this trip really took place closer to eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: when she was seventeen or eighteen instead of twelve or thirteen.
Speaker 1: There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is
Speaker 1: and when accepting all of these stories, of course, requires
Speaker 1: a bit of faith, because there isn't a way to
Speaker 1: corroborate the appearance of a spirit that only appears to
Speaker 1: one person, or even to verify simple events that are
Speaker 1: part of family history but have no actual record. Right,
Speaker 1: we don't know if she was thrown from a horse,
Speaker 1: no one would have recorded that in any way. We
Speaker 1: don't know if she climbed this tableful of things and
Speaker 1: was somehow protected and cleaned up after by a friendly spirit,
Speaker 1: because like, there's not like anybody files her report on that.
Speaker 1: When it came to this protector, Helena also didn't seem
Speaker 1: content to just use the idea as a means of
Speaker 1: explaining the unexplainable. As a teenager, she became really fixated
Speaker 1: on studying what exactly was it work when strange events
Speaker 1: happened around her. So she read, according to her own account,
Speaker 1: books on alchemy, magic, and the occult. These had been
Speaker 1: part of her great grandfather's royal library and included in
Speaker 1: these volumes there was even a book by the previous
Speaker 1: podcast subject to San Germaine, if that account is actually true.
Speaker 1: Reading the work of other explorers of the unknown gave
Speaker 1: her this base of knowledge that she then used as
Speaker 1: her jumping off point with her own mystical and philosophical explorations.
Speaker 1: Helena's teenageyers were a time full of significant change, as
Speaker 1: is pretty normal for a teenager, although hers is not
Speaker 1: always that normal. Uh, we're gonna delve into that after
Speaker 1: we first pause for a sponsor break. When Elena was fifteen,
Speaker 1: her life shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor
Speaker 1: of Saratov ended, and at that point Helena Vera and
Speaker 1: Leonad first spent a year with an aunt before joining
Speaker 1: their grandparents in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, which was
Speaker 1: called Tiflis at the time. As she turned sixteen, Helena
Speaker 1: had started to speak about a double life that she
Speaker 1: was leading. One was her normal, everyday life, and the
Speaker 1: other was her astral life. She also made the acquaintance
Speaker 1: of Prince Alexander Golitzen, who was similarly interested in the
Speaker 1: mystical and had traveled the world seeking out experts and
Speaker 1: practitioners of various occult and magical activities. Goliitsen is said
Speaker 1: to have encouraged Helena's interest in this secondary spiritual life,
Speaker 1: and specifically advised her to travel the same way that
Speaker 1: he had to learn more about the unknown. When Elena
Speaker 1: was seventeen, there was once again a sudden change in
Speaker 1: her circumstance, but this time in the form of a marriage.
Speaker 1: Seemingly out of nowhere. She wed Nikophor Blovotsky, a man
Speaker 1: in his forties who was vice governor of the Aravn
Speaker 1: Province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place
Speaker 1: in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. There's
Speaker 1: some theories that she may have just run off and
Speaker 1: gotten married as an act of rebellion against her father
Speaker 1: or her governess, who she was having some conflict with,
Speaker 1: and again that depends on the source you read. It
Speaker 1: also might have been a hastily arranged marriage made by
Speaker 1: the family in the hopes of tethering the increasingly restless
Speaker 1: Helena to her home in some way, But in later
Speaker 1: years she herself also said that Nikophor, unlike a lot
Speaker 1: of the men closer to her age, never mocked her
Speaker 1: interest in the mystical, and would talk to her about
Speaker 1: things that he had learned in other places cultures that
Speaker 1: might interest her as she studied such matters. This was
Speaker 1: not a good match, though. Helena got cold feet before
Speaker 1: the wedding even happened, and she tried to back out.
Speaker 1: She vanished for several days, and there were rumors that
Speaker 1: she had met up with Golitsin, but she returned from
Speaker 1: wherever she had gone in time for the wedding. That
Speaker 1: wedding took place on July seventh, eighteen forty nine, and
Speaker 1: she said to have refused to do the vow of
Speaker 1: honoring and obeying her new husband, but otherwise the ceremony
Speaker 1: did go as planned. According to Helena, though this marriage
Speaker 1: was never consummated, and we'll come back to this. No
Speaker 1: sooner was this wedding over than Helena began a series
Speaker 1: of attempts to run away from her new husband and
Speaker 1: her new life. She and Nikophore lived in the palace
Speaker 1: of Sardar in Araven, and she spent a great deal
Speaker 1: of time, it seems, evading guards who wished she would
Speaker 1: just stay put. Eventually, she did manage to get past
Speaker 1: the guards and she ran back to her family in Tiflis,
Speaker 1: and at that point the decision was to ship her
Speaker 1: off to her father and see if that might help,
Speaker 1: but she purposely missed the boat and then bribed a
Speaker 1: different boat captain to take her to Kerch. She traveled
Speaker 1: with two members of her family's household staff and assured
Speaker 1: them that she was still planning to rendezvous with her father.
Speaker 1: Then she gave them the slip. Similarly, after some issues
Speaker 1: with the captain of the English ship the Commodore, which
Speaker 1: was the captain she had bribed, she ran away again.
Speaker 1: The captain's boat was boarded by harbor police who were
Speaker 1: looking for this runaway aristocrat, and while she managed to
Speaker 1: evade capture by dressing as a cabin boy. The captain
Speaker 1: probably did not like all of this. Bus Soon she
Speaker 1: was gone, and this was the start of just a
Speaker 1: wild decade. The next nine years of Elena Blovotsky's life
Speaker 1: are very murky. She did not trust her family not
Speaker 1: to send her back to her husband if she told
Speaker 1: them where she was, so she didn't. With the possible
Speaker 1: exception of her father, who might have occasionally been sending
Speaker 1: her money, and because of the cloak and dagger nature
Speaker 1: of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about just what
Speaker 1: she was up to during those years of travel abound.
Speaker 1: Blovotsky's own accounts of this period of her life shifted
Speaker 1: and changed over the years, sometimes in ways that contradicted
Speaker 1: one another or created impossibilities in terms of the timeline.
Speaker 1: The first place that Madame Blovotsky explored was Constantinople. Later
Speaker 1: she shared that it was here that she met opera
Speaker 1: singer Agardi Metrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left for
Speaker 1: dead in the street, Blavotsky stood watch over him with
Speaker 1: a pistol to ward off anybody who had ill intent.
Speaker 1: While waiting for somebody to help her, arranged for him
Speaker 1: to get help. She did find some non nefarious help eventually,
Speaker 1: and Metrovich was treated and recovered. The two of them
Speaker 1: remained friends for the remaining two decades of the singer's life.
Speaker 1: Helena is also said to have made the acquaintance of
Speaker 1: the Countess Sophia Kislev in Constantinople, who she traveled with
Speaker 1: for several months, often disguised as a young man. They
Speaker 1: went to Egypt and Greece together before heading to Eastern Europe.
Speaker 1: Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe.
Speaker 1: Metrovich wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the
Speaker 1: two were married. Yeah, this is all very blurry. We
Speaker 1: don't know if this was like a i'm your friend,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell your grandparents that, like we're together now
Speaker 1: and explain this to your husband, or if he really
Speaker 1: thought they were getting married. It's again everything murky, murky marquis.
Speaker 1: But we do know that by the early eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: Blovotsky was first in Paris and then in London and
Speaker 1: in England, she had what she claimed was a significant
Speaker 1: spiritual experience. She met a man from India who she
Speaker 1: claimed to already know remember that protector from her childhood.
Speaker 1: She said that this man, who she called Master Mooria
Speaker 1: sometimes she'll just call him the Master, was one and
Speaker 1: the same, and the specifics around exactly when and where
Speaker 1: she met him shifted in her own accounts. She told
Speaker 1: different people that she had seen him in a crowd
Speaker 1: first and recognized him, others that she had met him
Speaker 1: at Waterloo Bridge when she was considering suicide. Another version
Speaker 1: was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition,
Speaker 1: and also that she met him in the seaside town
Speaker 1: of Ramsgate. But all of these versions, even though they
Speaker 1: are different, include his seeking her out to tell her
Speaker 1: that she must spend several years in Tibet before trying
Speaker 1: to make a path to Tibet. Though she headed to Canada,
Speaker 1: she was inspired by the writing of James Finnemore Cooper
Speaker 1: to seek out First Nations peoples. She found these encounters disappointing, though,
Speaker 1: and she attributed this disappointment to the indigenous population having
Speaker 1: been exposed to Christian missionaries. There's some layers here. There
Speaker 1: are so many layers, and she's very problematic when it
Speaker 1: comes to her interactions with people of other cultures because
Speaker 1: she does that thing where she simultaneously fetishizes them and
Speaker 1: criticizes the heck out of them as not being what
Speaker 1: she wanted them to be. It's very problematic. But after
Speaker 1: this time in Canada, she has said to have moved
Speaker 1: south to New Orleans and then into Texas before leaving
Speaker 1: North America for India. And she made it to India.
Speaker 1: She stayed in Bombay first for two years, and it
Speaker 1: said that during this time masters of ancient wisdom also
Speaker 1: told her to go to Tibet to learn about the
Speaker 1: integration of science, religion and philosophy. But she couldn't really
Speaker 1: make her way into Tibet. That was tricky at this time,
Speaker 1: Europeans not so much welcome. Tibet was very closed off.
Speaker 1: At this point, she decided to head back to England.
Speaker 1: Once she got there, she had quite the tale of
Speaker 1: her journey. She claimed that the ship she was on
Speaker 1: had wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope and that
Speaker 1: she was one of twenty one survivors. After allegedly meeting
Speaker 1: with the Master again in the home of someone she
Speaker 1: says she didn't know, Elena Blovotsky made her way to
Speaker 1: North America again. Yeah, this is the point in her
Speaker 1: story where I was, like, she's lost all sense of
Speaker 1: even grounding her tails in any sort of reality like
Speaker 1: this whole Oh, I took a ship from India and
Speaker 1: it was shipwrecked. Twenty one of us survived. Just no
Speaker 1: account of how she got back to Europe from that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit, a little bit kooky. But she
Speaker 1: landed in New York and then she headed west, first
Speaker 1: to Chicago and then to Salt Lake City, and from
Speaker 1: there she moved on to San Francisco, where she boarded
Speaker 1: a steamer to Japan. From there it was onto India,
Speaker 1: and this time with the help of a guide and
Speaker 1: disguised herself. She claimed to have entered Tibet in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty six. At last, the timeline of her travels was
Speaker 1: written up and published by Blovotsky in the Moscow Chronicle
Speaker 1: under the pen name Rada Bye. From Tibet, she was
Speaker 1: eventually ordered by the mysterious Master to travel back to Europe.
Speaker 1: All of this is disputed. It's entirely possible that she
Speaker 1: was just hanging out in Europe this whole time. As
Speaker 1: Holly said earlier, Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans.
Speaker 1: She might have managed to gain access to Tibet if
Speaker 1: she was traveling with one of the people that she
Speaker 1: name checked as a spiritual master from the surrounding area.
Speaker 1: But I mean, these are kind of long odds on this.
Speaker 1: There's just never been any corroborating information for these claims.
Speaker 1: But while the years from eighteen forty nine to eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight are really only known by what Blovotsky said
Speaker 1: she did, we do know that she was back in
Speaker 1: Russia with her family on Christmas eighteen fifty eight. Once again,
Speaker 1: again the family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to
Speaker 1: always surround her. Elena went back to her husband Nikophore
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty two, but Agardi Metrovich then showed up
Speaker 1: in Tiflis not long after, claiming his own rights as
Speaker 1: her husband. This whole thing is really messy and unclear.
Speaker 1: And then to confuse the situation further, she adopted a
Speaker 1: boy named Yuri with Nikophor. The couple didn't stay together.
Speaker 1: Yuri died at the age of five and was buried
Speaker 1: as Yuri Metrovich. Yuri's actual parentage is also a matter
Speaker 1: of debate. Madame Blovotsky said that this was the out
Speaker 1: of wedlock, son of her sister in law and a
Speaker 1: baron Mayandorf. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually
Speaker 1: the child of Helena and Metrovich. Yeah, it's a big
Speaker 1: it's a big cluster and mystery. We don't know. There's
Speaker 1: so many. I feel like she was so good at
Speaker 1: creating such a a past stee shift confusing details about
Speaker 1: her life that no one could untangle them and be like, wait,
Speaker 1: this doesn't end up. In eighteen sixty four, Blovotsky had
Speaker 1: a horse riding accident that actually left her in a
Speaker 1: coma for several months, and she said that when she
Speaker 1: came out of that coma, her paranormal abilities had been
Speaker 1: fully actualized. After this, she was once again on the
Speaker 1: move throughout Europe, before once again receiving instructions from the
Speaker 1: Master to go to Constantinople, then India and into Tibet
Speaker 1: again all unsubstantiated. We're about to get to the phase
Speaker 1: of Glovotsky's life where she became associated with spiritualism. Before
Speaker 1: we get into that, let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you
Speaker 1: missed in history class going in the eighteen seventies, Blovotsky
Speaker 1: became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a
Speaker 1: longtime listener to the podcast, you may recall that the
Speaker 1: modern spiritualist movement is usually cited as beginning with the
Speaker 1: Fox Sisters and their claims of communication with spirits. In
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight. Previous hosts Sarah and Deblina did a
Speaker 1: whole episode on their story. So by the time Helena
Speaker 1: Blovotsky became connected to it, spiritualism had been getting attention,
Speaker 1: particularly in the United States, for a couple of decades,
Speaker 1: and had grown very popular, even though it also had
Speaker 1: plenty of doubters right from the beginning. And although Madame
Speaker 1: Blovotsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not one
Speaker 1: hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved
Speaker 1: communication with the souls of the deceased. She didn't believe
Speaker 1: that events like seances were making contact with the dead,
Speaker 1: but instead that the entities being reached were elementals or shells,
Speaker 1: not actual souls. She did really love a seance, though,
Speaker 1: oh she certainly did, because that was part of her
Speaker 1: fully actualized paranormal abilities. After she came out of that
Speaker 1: como was that she could contact other realms through seances,
Speaker 1: and it is through her work conducting seances that she
Speaker 1: met the man who would become one of her greatest
Speaker 1: admirers and most enthusiastic collaborators. Madam Blovotsky had made her
Speaker 1: way back to North America by eighteen seventy three. She
Speaker 1: was living in New York City at the time, and
Speaker 1: she was actually kind of struggling to get by. She
Speaker 1: was working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself,
Speaker 1: and then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance
Speaker 1: in Vermont. Olcott was, in a lot of ways the
Speaker 1: last person you would expect to have responded positively to spiritualism.
Speaker 1: He had served in the US Army during the American
Speaker 1: Civil War, He had a career as a lawyer working
Speaker 1: on fraud cases, and by the time he met Blovotsky
Speaker 1: he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself
Speaker 1: at Blovotsky's seance because he was conducting investigative research into
Speaker 1: what a lot of people suspected were not spiritual experiences
Speaker 1: at all, but the work of Charlatan's Olcott had already
Speaker 1: written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming
Speaker 1: more and more fascinated by it. Yeah, there's a whole
Speaker 1: story about the farm that they're at, which was run
Speaker 1: by these people that were having seances and making money
Speaker 1: off of it, like they were, you know, charging entry
Speaker 1: fees and booking spiritualists to come in and do these
Speaker 1: I want to call them performances. But these these events.
Speaker 1: But even before the seance began, Olcott could not help
Speaker 1: but notice Helena, who stood out in the farming town
Speaker 1: of Chittenden, Vermont. Her manner of dress, including a bright
Speaker 1: red tunic and a fur tobacco pouch, her many rings,
Speaker 1: her blonde, curly hair, which Olcott described as like the
Speaker 1: fleece of a cotswald ew and the fact that he
Speaker 1: overheard her speaking French to a friend all drew the
Speaker 1: journalist in. He was completely fascinated. Here's how he read
Speaker 1: her later quote. This lady, Madame Helen p. Blovatsky, has
Speaker 1: a lot, a very eventful life, traveling in most of
Speaker 1: the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the
Speaker 1: base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples,
Speaker 1: and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior
Speaker 1: of Africa. The adventures she has encountered, the strange people
Speaker 1: she has seen, the perils by sea and land she
Speaker 1: has passed through, would make one of the most romantic
Speaker 1: stories ever told by a biographer. And the whole course
Speaker 1: of my experience I never met so interesting and, if
Speaker 1: I may say, without offense, eccentric a character. All Kat's
Speaker 1: endorsement went a really long way in terms of validating
Speaker 1: Blovatski's personal story. And he also called her quote a
Speaker 1: lady of such social position as to be incapable of
Speaker 1: entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters
Speaker 1: to deceive the public. He was like all in he
Speaker 1: believed everything she said without fact checking. It seemed the
Speaker 1: seance that Olcott witnessed sounds a little more like a
Speaker 1: stage show. Various spirits made appearances, as in showing up
Speaker 1: on stage a Native American woman, a man from the
Speaker 1: country of Georgia, the spirit of a German Man, and
Speaker 1: the French Canadian father of one of the attendees, who
Speaker 1: gave responses to questions posed in French by making rapping noises.
Speaker 1: And in one instance is said to have audibly uttered
Speaker 1: the word way. A journalist writing for The Smithsonian, Edward Hower,
Speaker 1: described Alcott as having one of the most dramatic midlife
Speaker 1: crises in history and his relationship with Blovotsky. Some takes
Speaker 1: on their relationship suggest that Madame Blovotsky was a home
Speaker 1: wrecker who caused Alcott's divorce. He was actually already estranged
Speaker 1: from his wife and in the legal proceedings to end
Speaker 1: that marriage before the two of them met. Rumors of
Speaker 1: an affair between the two of them persisted, though in
Speaker 1: part because he moved in with her when they both
Speaker 1: got back to New York. Even so, while Blovotsky and
Speaker 1: Olcott may have been emotionally very intimate, it really does
Speaker 1: seem unlikely that they had a romantic relationship, at least
Speaker 1: not one that manifested physically. We mentioned that Helena always
Speaker 1: said her first marriage was never consummated, and she claimed
Speaker 1: later in life that she had never had a sexual
Speaker 1: relationship with anyone. She generally described herself in a way
Speaker 1: that today might be categorized as asexual. She once said quote,
Speaker 1: I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain
Speaker 1: and a glacier at the foot of the mountain, but
Speaker 1: she and Olcott tended to refer to one another as chum,
Speaker 1: so they were close. But her characterization as a mistress
Speaker 1: who lured him away from his wife really doesn't quite track. Olcott,
Speaker 1: by the way, was known to have had mistresses. He
Speaker 1: sounds like something of a ladies man, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: appear that Blovotsky was one of them. Olcott was a
Speaker 1: major boon to Madame Blovotsky's public persona through his writing,
Speaker 1: as well as a source of financial support. Their shared
Speaker 1: apartment became an epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely
Speaker 1: hosted seances and discussions of the paranormal there. Blovotsky would
Speaker 1: invite journalists to visit so they would see that she
Speaker 1: was no trickster, just merely a woman who was in
Speaker 1: touch with other realms. And it was in this haven
Speaker 1: for discussion of the paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry
Speaker 1: Olcott suggested that they formalize their gatherings under an official
Speaker 1: organization that could study all of the mystical and spiritual
Speaker 1: subjects that they were all interested in. And this marks
Speaker 1: the beginning of the Theosophical Society, which sought to create
Speaker 1: an identity for itself that was separate from the spiritualist movement,
Speaker 1: and to help shape that identity, Elena began writing. One
Speaker 1: of the numerous reasons that Blavotsky was and remains the
Speaker 1: figure of controversy is really clear in her writing from
Speaker 1: this period. She published her book Isis Unveiled in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven. All Caught edited it, and she leveled a
Speaker 1: lot of criticism at both organized religion and the scientific community.
Speaker 1: She thought that both groups were missing the real path
Speaker 1: to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy, according to Helena Blovotsky, was
Speaker 1: the answer, and it was, to quote her quote, the
Speaker 1: synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. It was a way
Speaker 1: to bring those three disciplines together. This book was both
Speaker 1: praised and panned, and Blovotsky put all of the reviews
Speaker 1: into a scrapbook. Isis Unveiled is something of a hodgepodge.
Speaker 1: It borrows from religions all over the world, pulling in
Speaker 1: ideas which Blovotsky adapted from memory. Although she claimed that
Speaker 1: it was largely dictated to her telepathically by masters of
Speaker 1: ancient and secret knowledge. Its deepest roots are in Helena's
Speaker 1: verse versions of Buddhism and Hinduism, but she incorporated so
Speaker 1: many varied ideas because she envisioned theosophy as something that
Speaker 1: could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs. Although Madame
Speaker 1: Blovotsky had managed to amass a following in the United States,
Speaker 1: it didn't really sustain itself, and as her influence and
Speaker 1: the members of the Theosophical Society fizzled out, she and
Speaker 1: Alcott decided to move on and supporting Blovotsky and touting
Speaker 1: her gifts. He had really squandered his good name among
Speaker 1: his fellow journalists in the United States, who had really
Speaker 1: just taken to mocking him openly about it. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: kind of tanked his career to prepare to leave with
Speaker 1: an eye towards India. Elena Blovotsky became a US citizen,
Speaker 1: and the thinking here was that if things went badly overseas,
Speaker 1: she would have the protection of the consulate in India.
Speaker 1: She and the Colonel also sold off all of their belongings.
Speaker 1: They cleared out their cool apartment, and on December seventeenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight, they left the US for India. More
Speaker 1: specifically than simply going to India, though, all Kott and
Speaker 1: Blovotsky intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with
Speaker 1: the Ariya Samaje, which was a Hindu reform movement that
Speaker 1: had started in eighteen seventy five. All Kott and Blovotsky
Speaker 1: were novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they
Speaker 1: embraced Eastern religious ideas, and in doing so they kind
Speaker 1: of became media darlings for a time. Through a spiritualist
Speaker 1: named Alfred Percy Sinnett, who edited a British newspaper that
Speaker 1: published in India, the founders of the Theosophical Society were
Speaker 1: booked at seances throughout British society that lived in Bombay.
Speaker 1: At the time, colonialism seemed to be a little more palatable,
Speaker 1: if that meant it led to paying gigs for them.
Speaker 1: These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sennett's wife,
Speaker 1: for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find,
Speaker 1: Blovotsky told her it had rematerialized in her flower bed heads.
Speaker 1: Those flower beds were dug up and lo the brooch.
Speaker 1: She is also said to have produced a spray of
Speaker 1: roses in mid air which fell on the heads of
Speaker 1: people in the room when a visitor said that she
Speaker 1: could not produce a miracle. Olcott and Blovotsky set up
Speaker 1: their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay in eighteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Madame Blovotsky became the editor of their periodical, The Theosophist,
Speaker 1: which was the role she would have for the next
Speaker 1: nine years. Olcott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures. He
Speaker 1: spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity, and
Speaker 1: on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of course
Speaker 1: still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame Blovotsky
Speaker 1: publicly took Buddhist vows. Olcott took a deep interest in
Speaker 1: Ceylon and contributed to the Buddhist community there in a
Speaker 1: variety of ways, from opening schools to writing religious study
Speaker 1: texts to designing a flag which is still in use today.
Speaker 1: He also started working as a healer. He believed that
Speaker 1: magnetism had curative properties and that he could manipulate it
Speaker 1: to administer to all manner of ailments. While the beginning
Speaker 1: of Glovotsky's and Olcott's time in Bombay and Ceylon was joyous,
Speaker 1: the tides eventually turned. The members of the Theosophical Society
Speaker 1: asked Olcott to stop healing people. The public version of
Speaker 1: this story was that they felt like it was depleting
Speaker 1: his energy, but there was also likely some kind of
Speaker 1: version about it being problematic. Then, Olcott and Blovotsky became
Speaker 1: embroiled in a dispute when a woman that they had
Speaker 1: taken under their wing as a medium named Emma Colombe
Speaker 1: started to hold obviously fake seances to make easy money. Next,
Speaker 1: the head of the Arias Image denounced Theosophy very publicly,
Speaker 1: as he believed the incorporation of all faiths was not
Speaker 1: in line with his group's ideology. He had come to
Speaker 1: view Blovotsky and Olcott as untrustworthy. Yeah, he had pamphlets
Speaker 1: written up talking about how he had changed his mind
Speaker 1: and believed that they were Charlatan's and things only got
Speaker 1: worse from there. Alfred Percy Sinnett, who he mentioned just
Speaker 1: a little while ago, had published a book of letters,
Speaker 1: and these letters were alleged to have come from the
Speaker 1: Masters that Madame Blovotsky knew, but one of them was
Speaker 1: obviously plagiarized from an American periodical, and someone recognized it,
Speaker 1: and so the press, which had initially welcomed the Theosophists,
Speaker 1: turned on Blovotsky. They first started to question her legitimacy
Speaker 1: as a psychic, and soon she was just flat out
Speaker 1: accused of being a fraud in all the papers. She
Speaker 1: and Olcott moved their headquarters from Bombay to Madras in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two to get away from the controversy. That
Speaker 1: worked for a while, but within a few years there
Speaker 1: was another, much bigger controversy. Emma Colomb, who had been
Speaker 1: doing those fake seances, published a series of letters in
Speaker 1: a Madras periodical. She said they were written to her
Speaker 1: by Helena Blovotz. They clearly instructed her to create fake,
Speaker 1: miraculous and paranormal events to support their various stories. Bolovotsky
Speaker 1: and Alcott dismissed these letters as fakes, but they found
Speaker 1: themselves viewed with just a whole new level of suspicion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a really fun story in there about making a
Speaker 1: life size doll that they were puppeteering in like darkness
Speaker 1: to try to convince people they were being visited by
Speaker 1: the masters of Blovotsky often referenced there's some very fun
Speaker 1: and kooky theatricality to it, and that is how the
Speaker 1: London Society for Psychical Research came to open an investigation
Speaker 1: into Blovotsky in the Theosophical Society. That investigation, which was
Speaker 1: conducted by Richard Hodgson, was aided by none other than
Speaker 1: Emma Koolohm, who showed how, among other things, the miracle
Speaker 1: of things like letters dropping into visitors laps seemingly from
Speaker 1: thin air was actually achieved through a bit of theatrical trickery.
Speaker 1: There was a thread and hook system in the ceiling.
Speaker 1: A handwriting expert was also called upon to weigh in
Speaker 1: on whether the letters that Kolombe had provided as evidence
Speaker 1: of Madam Blovotsky's treachery were indeed written by Blovotsky. We
Speaker 1: have talked on the show before about some of the
Speaker 1: problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at
Speaker 1: the time. In eighteen eighty five, parapsychologist Richard Hodgson filed
Speaker 1: his report which concluded that Blovotsky was a fraud. Olcott
Speaker 1: was found to merely have been incredibly gullible. After the
Speaker 1: Hodgson Report, Blovotsky left India, although she continued to edit
Speaker 1: The Theosophist. The damage of this report was far reaching,
Speaker 1: in addition to discrediting Blovotsky in a very public way,
Speaker 1: and also sowed some conflict between her and Alcott. When
Speaker 1: Helena Blovotsky filed a slander suit against Richard Hodgson and
Speaker 1: the Society for Psychical Research, Alcott did not support that.
Speaker 1: He instead wanted to just let things died down the
Speaker 1: way they had in the past. To Helena, this really
Speaker 1: felt like a betrayal. It essentially ended their partnership and
Speaker 1: their friendship. Madame Lavotsky, who was quite ill at the
Speaker 1: time due to a problem with her liver, took a
Speaker 1: steamer to Europe, and despite the apparent seriousness of her
Speaker 1: health when she left India, she did make a recovery
Speaker 1: after spending some time in Belgium. She established the Blovotsky
Speaker 1: Lodge of London in eighteen eighty seven, and in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight she released the work that she's probably most
Speaker 1: well known for, which is called The Secret Doctrine, and
Speaker 1: that was a comprehensive look at theosophy. While she was
Speaker 1: writing this book, she had shifted focus away from the
Speaker 1: paranormal and wrote more extensively about philosophy. The book's subhead
Speaker 1: is there is no religion higher than Truth, and the
Speaker 1: introduction in Blovotsky makes her goal clear quote. The aim
Speaker 1: of this work may be thus stated, to show that
Speaker 1: nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of Adams, and to
Speaker 1: aid Si to man his rightful place in the scheme
Speaker 1: of the universe. To rescue from degradation the archaic truths
Speaker 1: which are the basis of all religions. To uncover, to
Speaker 1: some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring. Finally,
Speaker 1: to show that the occult side of nature has never
Speaker 1: been approached by the science of modern civilization. In eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine she published two more books. The Voice of
Speaker 1: Silence has the subtitle translated from the Book of the
Speaker 1: Golden Precepts, which shares a common origin with the Secret Doctrine.
Speaker 1: The rules and ethics presented here contrasts the two paths
Speaker 1: of spiritual attainment, the one pursued by those seeking knowledge
Speaker 1: for their own enlightenment, the other chosen by those whose
Speaker 1: aspirations are prompted by compassion for all. Her other book
Speaker 1: to come out that year was key to Theosophy, being
Speaker 1: a clear exposition in the form of question and answer
Speaker 1: of the ethics, science and philosophy for the study of
Speaker 1: which the Theosophical Society has been founded. Even though these
Speaker 1: were very popular and they continued to actually be printed,
Speaker 1: they were her really final achievements. Madam Blovotski died on
Speaker 1: May eighth, eighteen ninety one, at the tail end of
Speaker 1: an influenza epidemic, and that date of her death is
Speaker 1: now celebrated annually by Theosophists as White Lotus Day. Long
Speaker 1: after her death, starting in nineteen fifty, but A. Blovotska's
Speaker 1: collected writings were published. The full publication spanned fifteen volumes,
Speaker 1: and it came out over the course of forty years.
Speaker 1: Blovotsky is often credited with bringing Buddhism and Hinduism to
Speaker 1: the Western audience, and this is a little bit tricky
Speaker 1: to celebrate, of course, since these ideas were being channeled
Speaker 1: through a European lens. We also don't know really what
Speaker 1: the depth of her exposure was to these things before
Speaker 1: she started talking about them. As though she were an expert,
Speaker 1: and since the study of these belief systems on the
Speaker 1: part of Blovotsky is difficult to corroborate in any level,
Speaker 1: particularly in her earlier years. I just want people to
Speaker 1: recognize that that has to all be taken with a
Speaker 1: grain of salts. We do have to note though, that
Speaker 1: the Theosophical Society persists despite these bumpy times during Blovatski's life.
Speaker 1: Her books continue to be pretty popular. Additionally, the Blovotsky
Speaker 1: Lodge in London is still there, although it has changed
Speaker 1: locations from where it was when Madame Blovotski initially established it.
Speaker 1: And as for that damning report of eighteen eighty five
Speaker 1: that declared Madame Blovotsky a fraud, in nineteen eighty six
Speaker 1: the Society for Psychical Research retracted it due to a
Speaker 1: review that found that Hodgson had set out to discredit
Speaker 1: Blovotsky and that his research and his methods were biased
Speaker 1: toward that. Although there are a lot of the issues
Speaker 1: that Hodgson raised that remain unanswered, this is one of
Speaker 1: those things you'll sometimes find argued about on the Internet
Speaker 1: that some people will say this is vindication of Madame
Speaker 1: Blovotski and others are like, no, no, they're just pointing
Speaker 1: out that the research was bad, not weighing in really
Speaker 1: on whether that conclusion would have been reached otherwise. Right.
Speaker 1: Like I said, she continues to be very polarizing. I
Speaker 1: find her utterly fascinating, but I don't have a strong opinion.
Speaker 1: I have some opinions, but they're not strong, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of cloudy for me anyway, which is unusual, just
Speaker 1: because there's always part of me that's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know anything. So thanks so much for joining
Speaker 1: us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
Speaker 1: a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
Speaker 1: and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.