an epidemic of raps
Or, the unhinged and unending lies of Helena Blavatsky.
Hello friends!
First, a quick piece of author-life business, and then on to our regularly scheduled dirtbaggery.
Starting on October 5, I’m teaching a five-week virtual workshop on how to write, revise, and pitch historical fiction, hosted by one of my favorite indie bookstores, Bookends and Beginnings! The class meets from 7 to 8:30pm Central Time on five Wednesday evenings, and each week will focus on a different aspect of perfecting your historical fiction novel. Registration is open now, and I would love it if you joined us! If you have questions, drop me a line: comments are open, and you can always reply to these emails, so long as you’re not weird about it.
OK, moving along to the main attraction here, and trust me when I tell you it’s a good one:
Helena Blavatsky, A Lady Who Was 80% Lies, 20% Spooky Vibes, and 100% Audacity
This week’s dirtbag was suggested to me by my sister, who approached me last weekend with the question “Have you heard of that Russian lady who made the Tibetan spiritualist cult?” To which I naturally replied: “I have not, but I would like to.”
If you think you know from that summary what kind of story you are in for, let me be the first to tell you, you do not. For context, Wikpedia introduces the early life of Helena Blavatsky with the following truly incomparable sentences:
“Developing a reliable account of Blavatsky’s life has proved difficult for biographers because in later life she deliberately provided contradictory accounts and falsifications of her own past. The accounts of her early life provided by her family members have also been considered dubious by biographers.”
Hell yeah, Helena. We love a “everyone involved in this story physically could not stop lying so who the fuck even knows, but let’s go anyway” disclaimer.
Helena was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russia in 1831 to a relatively aristocratic family. Her dad was in the military, so they moved around a lot, and Helena was exposed to all sorts of cosmopolitan things like horseback riding, Tibetan Buddhism, and secret societies like the Freemasons. All three of these things will reappear later in this story, and not one of them is in the way you might expect.
In the mid-1840s, after her mother died of tuberculosis, Helena started reporting her first paranormal experiences. She claimed to be visited by an apparition of a “mysterious Indian man” who popped up like a racist Jiminy Cricket whenever she needed spiritual guidance, and she was reportedly experimenting with astral projecting around age 16.
Around the World in 80 Batshit Lies
In 1849, age 17, Helena married Nikifor Vladimirovich Blavatsky, a guy in his 40s whose sole attraction for Comrade Spooky Bitch seems to be that he was a recreational practitioner of magic. She almost immediately thought better of marrying him and ran away, fleeing her escorts and bribing strangers to bankroll a whirlwind tour around the world.
Now, a caveat: everything Helena says about her travels is likely bullshit. We only have her word to go on, and as you’re probably starting to pick up, her word is not worth much. Probably she went to Odessa and sat at a hotel for a few years with a cocktail or something. But it’s a damn good story the way she tells it, so let’s humor Helena and read about what she “got up to” in her “travels.”
I will provide the highlights in list format, because they truly do not hang together as a coherent narrative and also they are all fucking incredible.
She befriended a Hungarian opera singer in Constantinople after saving him from murder.
She traveled to Cairo to meet a Coptic magician.
She met up with her hallucination of a “mysterious Indian man” in London, who apparently now was a real guy she called Morya, and who told her that she had to travel to Tibet to discover her One True Secret Purpose. (If this bullet made you wonder whether Helena Blavatsky was racist, I am here to tell you that yes, and it’s way worse than you think.)
She tried to get to Tibet to discover her One True Secret Purpose, but Tibet, wisely, would not let her in.
She tried to do some James Fenimore Cooper cosplay in Canada, setting out to live among the First Nations communities of Quebec, although said communities robbed her instead, and good for them.
She got a job in the French circus.
She survived a shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope.
She worked as a concert musician for the Royal Philharmonic Society of England.
She tried for a second time to go to Tibet, and she got in this time, but immediately got lost in the mountains and barely made her way back to England.
At this point in the story, you’re probably saying “Helena Blavatsky, what in the actual cinnamon toast fuck are you doing?”
It is a valid question. I do not know the answer.
Levitating a Couch, Flirtatiously
After years of likely-made-up travel adventures, Helena returned to her family in Russia, at which point she started demonstrating everything she’d learned about magic and bullshit by performing all of spiritualism’s greatest hits for her friends and neighbors. I’m talking mysterious rapping and creaking sounds. I’m talking levitating furniture. All the good stuff.
She also, hilariously, got back together with her husband at this point. This is extra delightful to me as multiple biographies remember her as, quote, “outrageously untidy” and frequently stoned out of her mind. Mr. Blavatsky apparently looked at his shipwreck-wrestling, murder-stopping, couch-levitating, totally-blazed estranged bride and was like “Yes, absolutely, this is the lifestyle I would like to opt into.”
Shit got even weirder, though. In 1868, Helena fell from her horse during a recreational ride and ended up in a coma for several months. When she finally woke up, she started telling everyone that her time in a coma had unlocked her full psychic abilities. (The fact that she came up with this a full century before the invention of the daytime soap opera is remarkable.) And what did Helena decide to do with her newly optimized magic powers?
Why, go back to Tibet for the third time, obviously! This time, Helena allegedly traveled to a monastery in Tibet, where she met with a group of mystics led by a man who Totally Existed, improbably named Koot Hoomi. This spiritual leader—who, by the way, no one ever met but Helena—taught her the powers of clairvoyance, telepathy, mind control, and astral projection.
Wikipedia at this point tactfully remarks that “Many critics and biographers have expressed doubt about the veracity of Blavatsky’s claims regarding her visits to Tibet,” which. Uh. I imagine so.
Shawl We Dance
Once Helena Blavatsky had learned everything she could from the imaginary mind-reading Tibetan mystics, she departed Tibet and traveled through the Middle East, Europe, and America, spreading the word about the mystical magic she had learned. It’s a mark of how wild this story is that I am just fully skipping over the fact that her ship exploded in the Suez Canal while she was on board, because I simply do not have time to get into it.
By the time Helena got to America, it was the mid-1870s, which, as we discussed in the newsletter about the Fox Sisters, was still the heyday of American spiritualists. Ghosts and occultists were absolutely everywhere. Historian Mark Bevir calls this period of American spiritualism “an epidemic of raps,” which is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard and has also probably been a Fox News chyron at some point. For a magic fraudster like Helena, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Now, you know Helena pretty well by this point. So you know what she did. Obviously, she put on a mystic-looking, faintly-racist shawl and started lecturing about what she learned in the mountains of Tibet.
But in addition to gaining renown as an occultist, Helena also befriended a guy named Henry Steel Olcott, who was in the business of debunking fraudulent spiritualists. And Helena helped him!
Helena Blavatsky got a job debunking lying spiritualists. To which I can only say:
In Which the Taxidermied Raccoon Is Arguably the Least Weird Part
Olcott and Helena became good friends as they continued their spiritualist investigations. Such good friends, in fact, that they formed a two-person cult named the “Brotherhood of Luxor,” which they hosted in a New York apartment that they decorated with an enormous collection of taxidermied animals. Every single time you think I can’t pack another weird detail into this story, Helena kicks down the door to prove you wrong.
In 1875, Helena and Olcott got like two to four additional guys to join their spooky club, which they decided to name the Theosophical Society. What was Theosophy? Good fucking question. Once again, to quote her sassy Wikipedia page directly: “Theosophists would often argue over how to define Theosophy, with one member expressing the view that the task was impossible.”
Blavatsky tried to explain the concept in a long and fully unhinged book titled Isis Unveiled, which drew the attention of literary critics mostly because it plagiarized nearly 100 individual books, which has to be some sort of record. Isis Unveiled is 1,200 pages long and Helena claimed that she wrote it “as the words appeared before her eyes on another plane of existence,” which—yet again—I fucking wish would happen to me.
Somehow, Isis Unveiled was a major bestseller, and the Theosophical Society started gaining new branches all across the country. Thomas Motherfucking Edison belonged to a Theosophical Society. What is even happening anymore.
As she got older, Helena stayed on her bullshit, traveling Asia and Europe and pretending to perform magic tricks for onlookers who tolerated her with varying levels of interest. She hosted noted spooky times enthusiast W. B. Yeats at one of her occult salons. She founded her own publishing company because no one in her right mind would publish her next book, a 1,400-page critical commentary on a fake religious text that did not exist. She wanted to sue people who questioned her powers for libel, but claimed that she couldn’t demonstrate her powers because she had promised her Totally Real Gurus never to perform occult phenomena in public. Not for a single second of her life did she stop being the most audacious spooky bitch I have ever heard of.
Helena Blavatsky died at age 60 during the global flu pandemic of 1891. At this time, the Theosophical Society had approximately 100,000 members, despite literally no one being able to explain what it was about.
A queen. A legend. If you’re ever wondering what I look for in a dirtbag, this is exactly it. I am fully obsessed. If you need me for the next six calendar weeks, I will be trying to find a copy of Isis Unveiled and frantically reading every single word. I will be theosophizing until my heart can’t theosophize any more.
Until next time, my siblings in dirtbaggery, be well, and if you ever come across a person whose life has Helena Blavatsky vibes I demand you tell me immediately,
-Allison
Anyone else notice that all the photos of Helena Blavatsky contained herein look exactly like Bill Barr? Seriously...add some round spectacles, and she could legit pass for the former attorney general.