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Authors: Ted Nield
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Helena Petrovna was to grow up to be one of the strangest women of the nineteenth century, going from sweatshop worker to bareback rider, professional pianist and finally co-founder and guru of a pop-
ular and once-influential new religion called Theosophy. Helena Petrovna was the first of the New Agers, and she derived the name by which the world knows her today from her first husband, General Nikifor Vassiliyevich Blavatsky.
Escaping from the General soon after the wedding by breaking a candlestick over his head and fleeing on horseback to Constantinople, Madame Blavatsky – after another very short marriage – set off to travel the world, ending up in 1873 in New York, where she set up as a medium. There she teamed up with Henry Steel Olcott (a lawyer who left his family for her) and others and founded the Theosophical Society, a new religion combining aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. This new creed, she claimed, had come to her in a ‘secret doctrine’ passed down from an ancient brotherhood. Unlike those of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, Blavatsky’s ancient brothers derived from Eastern rather than Western sources. And in common with many subsequent New Agers, Blavatsky claimed that her so-called Akashic Wisdom was consistent with science, and especially the then fashionable new science of evolutionary biology. This was a remarkable claim, since the scientific idea she most hated was the one that humans had evolved from apes. Madame Blavatsky had her own ideas about that and set her own distinctive account of human origins on landmasses that no longer existed. Lemuria, coming as it did with impeccable scientific credentials, fitted the bill perfectly, just as it had for Tamils.
Blavatsky had moved from America to India in 1879, and in 1882 she passed a number of letters from her late Master, Koot Hoomi Lal Sing, to an Anglo-Indian newspaper. (Graphologists later determined that she wrote them herself.) The cosmology contained in them was based on the number seven: seven planes of existence, roots of humanity, cycles of evolution and reincarnation. This scheme formed the basis for her book The Secret Doctrine , which became the main text of the Theosophical movement.
Before she could finish this opus, however, Blavatsky was hounded out of India. Two of her staff, Alexis and Emma Coulomb (who may well have been put up to it by Christian missionaries), threatened to expose her mystic feats as trickery, and Blavatsky returned to Europe, where she completed The Secret Doctrine in 1888. It ultimately derived, she wrote, from a ‘lost’ work called The Stanzas of Dyzan. According to these, modern humans were the fifth of the seven ‘root races’. The third race had inhabited the lost supercontinent of Lemuria, bandy-legged, egg-laying hermaphrodites, some of whom had eyes in the back of their heads and four arms (though perhaps not both at once).
The Lemurians had, according to Blavatsky, lived alongside dinosaurs. As if this was not exciting enough, they also discovered sex. This turned out to be A Bad Idea (for the Lemurians) because it was the trigger, Blavatsky believed, for the destruction of their continent . Their surviving offspring (the fourth ‘root race’) were the Atlanteans. It was they who wrote the Stanzas and who gave rise to the fifth race, namely us. Modern humans would eventually give way to the sixth and seventh races, who would inhabit North and South America respectively.
Blavatsky died in London in May 1891 from a chronic kidney ailment aggravated by a bout of influenza, and was cremated at Woking cemetery. Rather like Lemuria, the movement she founded soon split up and sank in schism and recrimination, never maintaining the following it commanded while its high priestess was alive. (It is estimated to have peaked at about 100,000 worldwide and is known to have included several influential and otherwise apparently sane people.)
Theosophy, pioneer of a genre, lives on, as
Helena Petrovna was to grow up to be one of the strangest women of the nineteenth century, going from sweatshop worker to bareback rider, professional pianist and finally co-founder and guru of a pop-
ular and once-influential new religion called Theosophy. Helena Petrovna was the first of the New Agers, and she derived the name by which the world knows her today from her first husband, General Nikifor Vassiliyevich Blavatsky.
Escaping from the General soon after the wedding by breaking a candlestick over his head and fleeing on horseback to Constantinople, Madame Blavatsky – after another very short marriage – set off to travel the world, ending up in 1873 in New York, where she set up as a medium. There she teamed up with Henry Steel Olcott (a lawyer who left his family for her) and others and founded the Theosophical Society, a new religion combining aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. This new creed, she claimed, had come to her in a ‘secret doctrine’ passed down from an ancient brotherhood. Unlike those of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, Blavatsky’s ancient brothers derived from Eastern rather than Western sources. And in common with many subsequent New Agers, Blavatsky claimed that her so-called Akashic Wisdom was consistent with science, and especially the then fashionable new science of evolutionary biology. This was a remarkable claim, since the scientific idea she most hated was the one that humans had evolved from apes. Madame Blavatsky had her own ideas about that and set her own distinctive account of human origins on landmasses that no longer existed. Lemuria, coming as it did with impeccable scientific credentials, fitted the bill perfectly, just as it had for Tamils.
Blavatsky had moved from America to India in 1879, and in 1882 she passed a number of letters from her late Master, Koot Hoomi Lal Sing, to an Anglo-Indian newspaper. (Graphologists later determined that she wrote them herself.) The cosmology contained in them was based on the number seven: seven planes of existence, roots of humanity, cycles of evolution and reincarnation. This scheme formed the basis for her book The Secret Doctrine , which became the main text of the Theosophical movement.
Before she could finish this opus, however, Blavatsky was hounded out of India. Two of her staff, Alexis and Emma Coulomb (who may well have been put up to it by Christian missionaries), threatened to expose her mystic feats as trickery, and Blavatsky returned to Europe, where she completed The Secret Doctrine in 1888. It ultimately derived, she wrote, from a ‘lost’ work called The Stanzas of Dyzan. According to these, modern humans were the fifth of the seven ‘root races’. The third race had inhabited the lost supercontinent of Lemuria, bandy-legged, egg-laying hermaphrodites, some of whom had eyes in the back of their heads and four arms (though perhaps not both at once).
The Lemurians had, according to Blavatsky, lived alongside dinosaurs. As if this was not exciting enough, they also discovered sex. This turned out to be A Bad Idea (for the Lemurians) because it was the trigger, Blavatsky believed, for the destruction of their continent . Their surviving offspring (the fourth ‘root race’) were the Atlanteans. It was they who wrote the Stanzas and who gave rise to the fifth race, namely us. Modern humans would eventually give way to the sixth and seventh races, who would inhabit North and South America respectively.
Blavatsky died in London in May 1891 from a chronic kidney ailment aggravated by a bout of influenza, and was cremated at Woking cemetery. Rather like Lemuria, the movement she founded soon split up and sank in schism and recrimination, never maintaining the following it commanded while its high priestess was alive. (It is estimated to have peaked at about 100,000 worldwide and is known to have included several influential and otherwise apparently sane people.)
Theosophy, pioneer of a genre, lives on, as
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