CHAPTER 1

CHILDHOOD

For the following particulars concerning the family I am indebted to some of its present representatives who have taken an interest in the preparation of these memoirs.

“A strange fatality seems always to have persecuted this family in connection with England; and its greatest vicissitudes have been in some way associated with that country. Several of its members died, and others fell into political disgrace, as they were on their way to London. The last and most interesting of all is the tragedy connected with the Prince Sergeéy Gregoreevitch Dolgorouky, Mme. Blavatsky's grandmother's grandfather, who was ambassador in Poland. At the advent of the Archduchess Anne of Courlang to the throne of Russia, owing to their opposition to her favourite of infamous memory, the Chancellor Biron, many of the highest families were imprisoned or exiled; others put to death and their wealth confiscated. Among these, such fate befell the Prince Sergèey Dolgorouky. He was sent in exile to Berezof (Siberia) without any explanation, and his private fortune, that consisted of 200,000 serfs, was confiscated. His two little sons were, the elder placed with a village smith as an apprentice, the younger condemned to become a simple soldier, and sent to Azof. Eight years later the Empress Anne laxnovna recalled the exiled father, pardoned him, and sent him as ambassador to London. Knowing Biron well, however, the prince sent to the Bank of England 100,000 roubles to be left untouched for a century, capital and accumulated interest, to be distributed after that period to his direct descendants. His presentiment proved correct. He had not yet reached Novgorod, on his way to England, when he was seized and put to death by 'quartering' (cut in four). When the Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's daughter, came to the throne next, her first care was to undo the great wrongs perpetrated by her predecessor through her cruel and crafty favourite Biron. Among other exiles the two sons and heirs of Prince Sergeéy were recalled, their title restored, and their property ordered to be given back. This, however, instead of being 200,000 serfs, had dwindled down to only 8000. The younger son, after a youth of extreme misery and hardship, became a monk, and died young. The elder married a Princess Romadanovsky; and his son, Prince Paul, Mme. Blavatsky's great-grandfather, named while yet in his cradle a Colonel of the Guards by the Emperor, married a Countess du Plessy, the daughter of a noble French Huguenot family, emigrated from France to Russia. Her father had found service at the Court of the Empress Catherine II where her mother was the favourite dame d'honneur.

“The receipt of the Bank of England for the sum of 100,000 roubles, a sum that at the end of the term of one hundred years had grown to immense proportions, had been handed by a friend of the politically murdered prince to the grandson of the latter, the Prince Paul Dolgorouky. It was preserved by him with other family documents at Marfovka, a large family property in the government of Penja, where the old prince lived and died in 1837. But the document was vainly searched for by the heirs after his death ; it was nowhere to be found. To their great horror further research brought to light the fact that it must have been burnt, together with the residence, in a great fire that had some time previous destroyed nearly the whole village. Having lost his sight in a paralytic stroke some years previous to his demise, the octogenarian prince, old and ill, had been kept in ignorance of the loss of the most important of his family documents. This was a crushing misfortune, that left the heirs bereft of their contemplated millions. Many were the attempts made to come to some compromise with the bank, but to no purpose. It was ascertained that the deposit had been received at the bank, but some mistake in the name had been made, and then the bank demanded very naturally the receipt delivered about the middle of the last century. In short, the millions disappeared for the Russian heirs. Mme. Blavatsky has thus in her veins the blood of three nations — the Slavonian, the German, and the French.”

The year of Mademoiselle Hahn's birth, 1831, was fatal for Russia, as for all Europe, owing to the first visit of the cholera, that terrible plague that decimated from 1830 to 1832 in turn nearly every town of the continent, and carried away a large part of its populations. Her birth was quickened by several deaths in the house. She was ushered into the world amid coffins and desolation. The following narrative is composed from the family records :—

“Her father was then in the army, intervals of peace after Russia's war with Turkey in 1829 being filled with preparations for new fights. The baby was born on the night between July 30 and 31 — weak and apparently no denizen of this world. A hurried baptism had to be resorted to, therefore, lest the child died with the burden of original sin on her soul. The ceremony of baptism in 'orthodox' Russia is attended with all the paraphernalia of lighted tapers, and 'pairs' of godmothers and godfathers, every one of the spectators and actors being furnished with consecrated wax candles during the whole proceedings. Moreover, everyone has to stand during the baptismal rite, no one being allowed to sit in the Greek religion — as they do in Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches — during the church and religious service. The room selected for the ceremony in the family mansion was large, but the crowd of devotees eager to witness it was still larger. Behind the priest officiating in the centre of the room, with his assistants, in their golden robes and long hair, stood the three pairs of sponsors and the whole household of vassals and serfs. The child-aunt of the baby — only a few years older than her niece aged twenty-four hours, — placed as ' proxy ' for an absent relative, was in the first row immediately behind the venerable protopope. Feeling nervous and tired of standing still for nearly an hour, the child settled on the floor, unperceived by the elders, and became probably drowsy in the overcrowded room on that hot July day. The ceremony was nearing its close. The sponsors were just in the act of renouncing the Evil One and his deeds, a renunciation emphasised in the Greek Church by thrice spitting upon the invisible enemy, when the little lady, toying with her lighted taper at the feet of the crowd,  inadvertently set fire to the long flowing robes of the priest, no one remarking the accident until it was too late. The result was an immediate conflagration, during which several persons — chiefly the old priest — were severely burnt. That was another bad omen, according to the superstitious beliefs of orthodox Russia; and the innocent cause of it — the future Mme. Blavatsky — was doomed from that day in the eyes of all the town to an eventful life, full of vicissitude and trouble.

Born in the very heart of the country which the Roussalka (the Undine) has chosen for her abode ever since creation — reared on the shores of the blue Dnieper, that no Cossack of Southern Ukraine ever crosses without preparing himself for death — the child's belief in these lovely green-haired nymphs was developed before she had heard of anything else. The catechism of her Ukraine nurses passed wholly into her soul, and she found all these weird poetical beliefs corroborated to her by what she saw, or fancied she saw, herself around her ever since her earliest babyhood. Legends seem to have  lingered in her family, preserved by the recollections of the older servants, of events connected with such beliefs, and they inspired the early tyranny she was taught to exercise, as soon as she understood the powers that were attributed to her by her nurses. The sandy shores of the rapid Dnieper encircling Ekaterinoslaw, with their vegetation of sallows, were her favorite rambling place, Once there, she saw a roussalka in every willow tree, smiling and beckoning to her; and full of her own invulnerability, impressed upon her mind by her nurses, she was the only one who approached those shores fearless and daring. The child felt her superiority and abused it. The little four-year-old girl demanded that her will should be implicitly recognized by her nurse, lest she should escape from her side, and thus leave her unprotected, to be tickled to death by the beautiful and wicked roussalka, who would no longer be restrained by the presence of one whom she dared not approach. Of course her parents knew nothing of this side of the education of their eldest born, and learned it too late to allow such beliefs to be eradicated from her mind. It is only after a tragic event that would otherwise have passed hardly noticed by the family, that a foreign governess was thought of. In one of her walks by the river side a boy about fourteen who was dragging the child's carriage incurred her displeasure by some slight disobedience. “I will have you tickled to death by a roussalka ! ” she screamed. “There's one coming down from that tree . . . here she comes . . . See, see!” Whether the boy saw the dreaded nymph or not, he took to his heels, and, the angry commands of the nurse notwithstanding, disappeared along the sandy banks leading homeward. After much grumbling the old nurse was constrained to return home alone with her charge, determined to have “Pavlik” punished. But the poor lad was never seen alive again. He ran away to his village, and his body was found several weeks later by fishermen, who caught him in their nets. The verdict of the police was “drowning by accident”. It was thought that the lad, having sought to cross some shallow pools left from the spring inundations, had got into one of the many sand pits so easily transformed by the rapid Dnieper into whirlpools. But the verdict of the horrified household — of the nurses and servants — pointed to no accidental death, but to the one that had occurred in consequence of the child having withdrawn from the boy her mighty protection, thus delivering the victim to some roussalka on the watch. The displeasure of the family at this foolish gossip was enhanced when they found the supposed culprit gravely corroborating the charge, and maintaining that it was she herself who had handed over her disobedient serf to her faithful servants the water-nymphs. Then it was that an English governess was brought upon the scene.

Miss Augusta Sophia Jeffries did not believe in the roussalkas or the domovoys; but this negative merit was insufficient to invest her with a capacity for managing the intractable pupil consigned to her care. She gave up her task in despair, and the child was again left to her nurses till about six years old, when she and her still younger sister were sent to live with their father. For the next two or three years the little girls were chiefly taken care of by their father's orderlies; the elder, at all events, greatly preferring these to their female attendants. They were taken about with the troops to which their father was attached, and were petted on all sides as the enfants du régiment.

Her mother died when Mademoiselle Hahn was still a child, and at about eleven years of age she was taken charge of altogether by her grandmother, and went to live at Saratow, where her grandfather was civil governor, having previously exercised similar authority in Astrachan. She speaks of having at this time been alternately petted and punished, spoiled and hardened; but we may well imagine that she was a difficult child to manage on any uniform system. Moreover, her health was always uncertain in childhood; she was “ever sick and dying”, as she expresses it herself, a sleep walker, and remarkable for various abnormal psychic peculiarities, set down by her orthodox nurses of the Greek Church to possession by the devil, so that she was drenched during childhood, as she often says, in enough holy water to have floated a ship, and exorcised by priests who might as well have been talking to the wind for all the effect they produced on her.

Some notes concerning her childhood have been furnished, for the service of the present memoir, by her aunt, a lady who, as well as Madame Jelihowsky, is known personally to myself and to many others of Mme. Blavatsky's friends in Europe. Her strange excitability of temperament, still one of her most marked characteristics, was already manifest in her earliest youth. Even then she was liable to ungovernable fits of passion, and showed a deep-rooted disposition to rebel against every kind of authority or control. Her warm-hearted impulses of kindliness and affection, however, endeared her to her relatives in childhood, much as they have operated to obliterate the irritation caused sometimes by her want of self-control in regard to the minor affairs of life with the friends of a later period. It is justly asserted by the memoranda before me, “she has no malice in her nature, no lasting resentment even against those who  have wronged her, and her true kindness of heart bears no permanent traces of momentary disturbances”.

“Spoilt in her childhood by the adulation of dependents and the devoted affection of relatives, who forgave all to ' the poor, motherless child' — later on, in her girlhood, her self-willed temper made her rebel openly against the exigencies of society. She would submit to no sham respect for or fear of the public opinion. She would ride at fifteen, as she had at ten, any Cossack horse on a man's saddle! She would bow to no one, as she would recede before no prejudice or established conventionality. She defied all and everyone. As in her childhood, all her sympathies and attractions went out towards people of the lower class. She had always preferred to play with her servants' children rather than with her equals, and as a child had to be constantly watched for fear she should escape from the house to make friends with ragged street boys. So, later on in life, she continued to be drawn in sympathy towards those who were in a humbler station of life than herself, and showed as pronounced indifference to the ' nobility ' to which by birth she belonged.”

The five years passed in safety with her grandparents seem to have had an important influence on her future life. Miss Jeffries had left the family; the children had another English governess, a timid young girl to whom none of her pupils paid any attention, a Swiss preceptor, and a French governess, who had gone through remarkable adventures in her youth. Madame Henriette Peigneur was a distinguished beauty in the days of the first French Revolution. Her favorite narratives to the children consisted in the description of those days of glory and excitement when, chosen by the “Phrygian red-caps”, the citoyens rouges of Paris to represent in the public festivals the Goddess of Liberty, she had been driven in triumph, day after day, along the streets of the grande ville in glorious processions. The narrator herself was now a weird old woman, bent down by age, and looked more like the traditional Fée Carabosse than anything else. But her eloquence was moving, and the young girls that formed her willing audience were greatly excited by the glowing descriptions — most of all the heroine of these memoirs. She declared then and there that she meant to be a “Goddess of Liberty” all her life. The old governess was a strange mixture of severe morality and of that brilliant flippancy that characterises almost every Parisienne to her deathbed unless she is a bigot — which Mme. Peigneur was not. But while her old husband — the charming, witty, kind-hearted Sieur Peigneur, ever ready to screen the young girls from his wife's pénitences and severity — taught them the merriest songs of Béranger, his best bons mots and anecdotes, his wife had no such luck with her lesson books. The opening of Noël and Chopsal became generally the signal for an escape to the wild woods that surrounded the large villa occupied by Mademoiselle Hahn's grandparents during the summer months. It was only when roaming at leisure in the forest, or riding some unmanageable horse on a Cossack's saddle, that the girl felt perfectly happy.

For the following interesting reminiscence of this period I am indebted to Mme. Jelihowsky: —

“Intensely nervous and sensitive, speaking loud, and often walking in her sleep, she used to be found at nights in the most out-of-way places, and to be carried back to her bed profoundly asleep. Thus she was missed from her room one night when she was hardly twelve, and, the alarm having been given, she was searched for and found pacing one of the long subterranean corridors, evidently in deep conversation with someone invisible for all but herself. She was the strangest girl one has ever seen, one with a distinct dual nature in her, that made one think there were two beings in one and the same body; one mischievous, combative, and obstinate — everyway graceless; the other as mystical and metaphysically inclined as a seeress of Prevorst. No schoolboy was ever more uncontrollable or full of the most unimaginable and daring pranks and espiègleries than she was. At the same time, when the paroxysm of mischief-making had run its course, no old scholar could be more assiduous in his study, and she could not be prevailed to give up her books, which she would devour night and day as long as the impulse lasted. The enormous library of her grandparents seemed then hardly large enough to satisfy her cravings.

“Attached to the residence there was a large abandoned garden, a park rather, full of ruined kiosks, pagodas, and out-buildings, which, running up hillward, ended in a virgin forest, whose hardly visible paths were covered knee-deep with moss, and with thickets in it which perhaps no human foot had disturbed for centuries. It was reputed the hiding-place for all the runaway criminals and deserters, and it was there that Helen used to take refuge, when the ' catacombs' had ceased to assure her safety.”

Her strange temperament and character are thus described in a work called Juvenile Recollections Compiled for my Children, by Mme. Jelihowsky, a thick volume of charming stories selected by the author from the diary kept by herself during her girlhood: —

“Fancy, or that which we all regarded in these days as fancy, was developed in the most extraordinary way, and from her earliest childhood, in my sister Helen. For hours at times she used to narrate to us younger children, and even to her seniors in years, the most incredible stories with the cool assurance and conviction of an eye-witness, and one who knew what she was talking about. When a child, daring and fearless in everything else, she got often scared into fits through her own hallucinations. She felt certain of being persecuted by what she called ' the terrible glaring eyes,' invisible to everyone else, and often attributed by her to the most inoffensive inanimate objects; an idea that appeared quite ridiculous to the bystanders. As to herself, she would shut her eyes tight during such visions, and run away to hide from the ghostly glances thrown on her by pieces of furniture or articles of dress, screaming desperately, and frightening the whole household. At other times she would be seized with fits of laughter, explaining them by the amusing pranks of her invisible companions. She found these in every dark corner, in every bush of the thick park that surrounded our villa during the summer months ; while in winter, when all our family emigrated back to town, she seemed to meet them again in the vast reception rooms of the first floor, entirely deserted from midnight till morning, Every locked door notwithstanding, Helen was found several times during the night hours in those dark apartments in a half-conscious state, sometimes fast asleep, and unable to say how she got there from our common bedroom on the top story. She disappeared in the same mysterious manner in daytime also. Searched for, called and hunted after, she would be often discovered, with great pains, in the most unfrequented localities; once it was in the dark loft, under the very roof, to which she was traced, amid pigeons' nests, and surrounded by hundreds of those birds. She was ' putting them to sleep ' (according to the rules taught in Solomon's Wisdom], as she explained. [And, indeed pigeons were found if not asleep still unable to move, and as though stunned in her lap at such times.] At other times behind the gigantic cupboards that contained our grandmother's zoological collection — the old princess's museum of natural history having achieved a wide renown in Russia in those days, — surrounded by relics of fauna, flora, and historical antiquities, amid antediluvian bones of stuffed animals and monstrous birds, the deserter would be found, after hours of search, in deep conversations with seals and stuffed crocodiles. If one could believe Helen, the pigeons were cooing to her interesting fairy tales, while birds and animals, whenever in solitary tête-à-tête with her, amused her with interesting stories, presumably from their own autobiographies. For her all nature seemed animated with a mysterious life of its own. She heard the voice of every object and form, whether organic or inorganic; and claimed consciousness and being, not only for some mysterious powers visible and audible for herself alone in what was to everyone else empty space, but even for visible but inanimate things such as pebbles, mounds, and pieces of decaying phosphorescent timber.

“With a view of adding specimens to the remarkable entomological collection of our grandmother, as much as for our own instruction and pleasure, diurnal as well as nocturnal expeditions were often arranged. We preferred the latter, as they were more exciting, and had a mysterious charm to us about them. We knew of no greater enjoyment. Our delightful travels in the neighbouring woods would last from 9 P.M. till I, and often 2, o'clock A.M. We prepared for them with an earnestness that the Crusaders may have experienced when setting out to fight the infidel and dislodge the Turk from Palestine. The children of friends and acquaintances in town were invited — boys and girls from twelve to seventeen, and two or three dozen of young serfs of both sexes, all armed with gauze nets and lanterns, as we were ourselves, strengthened our ranks. In the rear followed a dozen of strong grown-up servants, cossacks, and even a gendarme or two, armed with real weapons for our safety and protection. It was a merry procession as we set out on it, with beating hearts, and bent with unconscious cruelty on the destruction of the beautiful large night-butterflies for which the forests of the Volga province are so famous. The foolish insects, flying in masses, would soon cover the glasses of our lanterns, and ended their ephemeral lives on long pins and cork burial grounds four inches square. But even in this my eccentric sister asserted her independence. She would protect and save from death all those dark butterflies — known as sphynxes —whose dark fur-covered heads and bodies bore the distinct images of a white human skull. ' Nature having imprinted on each of them the portrait of the skull of some great dead hero, these butterflies are sacred, and must not be killed,' she said, speaking like some heathen fetish-worshipper. She got very angry when we would not listen to her, but would go on chasing those ' dead heads' as we called them; and maintained that by so doing we disturbed the rest of the defunct persons whose skulls were imprinted on the bodies of the weird insects.

“No less interesting were our day-travels into regions more or less distant. At about ten versts from the Governor's villa there was a field, an extensive sandy tract of land, evidently once upon a time the bottom of a sea or a great lake, as its soil yielded petrified relics of fishes, shells, and teeth of some (to us) unknown monsters. Most of these relics were broken and mangled by time, but one could often find whole stones of various sizes on which were imprinted figures of fishes and plants and animals of kinds now wholly extinct, but which proved their undeniable antediluvian origin. The marvellous and sensational stories that we, children and schoolgirls, heard from Helen during that epoch were countless. I well remember when stretched at full length on the ground, her chin reclining on her two palms, and her two elbows buried deep in the soft sand, she used to dream aloud and tell us of her visions, evidently clear, vivid, and as palpable as life to her! . . . How lovely the description she gave us of the submarine life of all those beings, the mingled remains of which were now crumbling to dust around us. How vividly she described their past fights and battles on the spot where she lay, assuring us she saw it all; and how minutely she drew on the sand with her finger the fantastic forms of the long-dead sea-monsters, and made us almost see the very colours of the fauna and flora of those dead regions. While listening eagerly to her descriptions of the lovely azure waves reflecting the sunbeams playing in rainbow light on the golden sands of the sea bottom, of the coral reefs and stalactite caves, of the sea-green grass mixed with the delicate shining anemones, we fancied we felt ourselves the cool, velvety waters caressing our bodies, and the latter transformed into pretty and frisky sea-monsters; our imagination galloped off with her fancy to a full oblivion of the present reality. She never spoke in later years as she used to speak in her childhood and early girlhood. The stream of her eloquence has dried up, and the very source of her inspiration is now seemingly lost! She had a strong power of carrying away her audiences with her, of making them see actually, if even vaguely, that which she herself saw. . . . Once she frightened all of us youngsters very nearly into fits. We had just been transported into a fairy world, when suddenly she changed her narrative from the past to the present tense, and began to ask us to imagine that all that which she had told us of the cool, blue waves with their dense populations was around us, only invisible and intangible, so far. . . . 'Just fancy! A miracle!' she said ; ' the earth suddenly opening, the air condensing around us and rebecoming sea waves.....Look, look there, they begin already appearing and moving. We are surrounded with water, we are right amid the mysteries and the wonders of a submarine world ! . . .'

“She had started from the sand, and was speaking with such conviction, her voice had such a ring of real amazement, horror, and her childish face wore such a look of a wild joy and terror at the same time, that when, suddenly covering her eyes with both hands, as she used to do in her excited moments, she fell down on the sand screaming at the top of her voice, 'There's the wave . . . it has come! . . . The sea, the sea, we are drowning !' . . . Every one of us fell down on our faces, as desperately screaming and as fully convinced that the sea had engulfed us, and that we were no more! . .

“It was her delight to gather around herself a party of us younger children at twilight, and, after taking us into the large dark museum, to hold us there, spell-bound, with her weird stories. Then she narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself; the most unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine, every night, as she explained. Each of the stuffed animals in the museum had taken her in turn into its confidence, had divulged to her the history of its life in previous incarnations or existences. Where had she heard of reincarnation, or who could have taught her anything of the superstitious mysteries of metempsychosis, in a Christian family ? Yet she would stretch herself on her favourite animal, a gigantic stuffed seal, and caressing its silvery, soft white skin, she would repeat to us his adventures, as told to her by himself, in such glowing colours and eloquent style, that even grown-up persons found themselves interested involuntarily in her narratives. They all listened to, and were carried away by the charm of her recitals, the younger audience believing every word she uttered. Never can I forget the life and adventures of a tall white flamingo, who stood in unbroken contemplation behind the glass panes of a large cupboard, with his two scarlet-lined wings widely opened as though ready to take flight, yet chained to his prison cell. He had been ages ago, she told us, no bird, but a real man. He had committed fearful crimes and a murder, for which a great genius had changed him into a flamingo, a brainless bird, sprinkling his two wings with the blood of his victims, and thus condemning him to wander for ever in deserts and marshes. . . .

“I dreaded that flamingo fearfully. At dusk, whenever I chanced to pass through the museum to say goodnight to our grandmother, who rarely left her study, an adjoining room, I tried to avoid seeing the blood-covered murderer by shutting my eyes and running quickly by.

“If Helen loved to tell us stories, she was still more passionately fond of listening to other people's fairy tales. There was, among the numerous servants of the Fadeef family, an old woman, an under-nurse, who was famous for telling them. The catalogue of her tales was endless, and her memory retained every idea connected with superstition. During the long summer twilights on the green grassy lawn under the fruit trees of the garden, or during the still longer winter evenings, crowding around the flaming fire of our nursery-room, we used to cling to the old woman, and felt supremely happy whenever she could be prevailed upon to tell us some of those popular fairy tales, for which our northern country is so famous. The adventures of' Ivan Zarewitch,' of' Kashtey the Immortal,' of the 'Gray-Wolf', the wicked magician travelling in the air in a self-moving seive; or those of Meletressa, the Fair Princess, shut up in a dungeon until the Zarevitch unlocks its prison door with a gold key, and liberates her — delighted us all. Only, while all we children forgot those tales as easily as we had learned them, Helen never either forgot the stories or consented to recognise them as fictions. She thoroughly took to heart all the troubles of the heroes, and maintained that all their most wonderful adventures were quite natural. People could change into animals and take any form they liked, if they only knew how; men could fly, if they only wished so firmly. Such wise men had existed in all ages, and existed even in our own days, she assured us, making themselves known, of course, only to those who were worthy of knowing and seeing them, and who believed in, instead of laughing at, them. . . .

“As a proof of what she said, she pointed to an old man, a centenarian, who lived not far from the villa, in a wild ravine of a neighbouring forest, known as 'Baranig Bouyrak'. The old man was a real magician, in the popular estimation; a sorcerer of a good, benevolent kind, who cured willingly all the patients who applied to him, but who also knew how to punish with disease those who had sinned. He was greatly versed in the knowledge of the occult properties of plants and flowers, and could read the future, it was said. He kept beehives in great numbers, his hut being surrounded by several hundreds of them. During the long summer afternoons he could be always found at his post, slowly walking among his favourites, covered as with a living cuirass, from head to foot, with swarms of buzzing bees, plunging both his hands with impunity into their dwellings, listening to their deafening noise, and apparently answering them — their buzzing almost ceasing whenever he addressed them in his (to us) incomprehensible tongue, a kind of chanting and muttering. Evidently the golden-winged labourers and their centenarian master understood each other's languages. Of the latter, Helen felt quite sure. ' Baranig Bouyrak' had an irresistible attraction for her, and she visited the strange old man whenever she could find a chance to do so. Once there, she would put questions and listen to the old man's replies and explanations as to how to understand the language of bees, birds, and animals with a passionate earnestness. The dark ravine seemed in her eyes a fairy kingdom. As to the centenarian ' wise-man', he used to say of her constantly to us: ' This little lady is quite different from all of you. There are great events lying in wait for her in the future. I feel sorry in thinking that I will not live to see my predictions of her verified; but they will all come to pass! . . .' ”

It would be impossible to write even a slight sketch of Mme. Blavatsky's life without alluding continually to the occult theories on which her own psychological development turns, and I think the narrative will be rendered most intelligible if I frankly explain some of these at the outset, without here being supposed to argue the question as to whether these theories rest upon a correct appreciation of natural laws (operating above and within those of physical existence), or whether they constitute an exclusive hallucination to which her mind has been subject. It will be seen, at all events, that, according to such a view, the hallucination has been very protracted and coherent, so much so that, as I say, the life which has been entirely subordinate to the career marked out for it by those to whom Mme. Blavatsky believes herself, and always has believed herself, guided and protected, would be meaningless without reference to this vitalising thread running through it. Of course I have no wish to disguise my own adhesion to the view of nature on which Mme. Blavatsky's theory of life rests, nor my own conviction concerning the real existence of the living Adepts of occult science with whom I believe Mme. Blavatsky, throughout her life, to have been more or less closely associated. But to argue the matter would convert this memoir into a philosophical treatise going over a great deal of ground more fitly traversed in works of a purely theosophical character. It will be enough for my present purpose to expound the theory on which, as I say, Mme. Blavatsky's comprehension of her own life rests, merely for the sake of rendering the story which has to be set forth intelligible to the reader.

The primary conception of oriental occultism, in reference to the human soul, recognises it as an entity, a moral and intellectual centre of consciousness, which not only survives the death of any physical body in which it may be functioning at any given time, but has also enjoyed many periods of both physical and spiritual existence before its incarnation in that body. In fact, the entity — the real individual according to this view — may be identified by persons with psychic faculties sufficiently developed through a series of lives, and not merely in reference to one. The view of Nature I am describing — the Esoteric Doctrine — quite sufficiently accounts for the fact that, from the point of view of any given body, no incarnated person can command a prospect of the life-series through which he may have passed. Each incarnation, each successive life of the series, is a descent into matter from the point of view of the real spiritual entity: a descent into a new organism in which the entity — which is only altogether its true or higher self on the spiritual plane of Nature — may function with greater or less success according to the qualifications of the organism. The organism only remembers, with specific detail, the incidents of its own objective life. The true entity animating that organism may perhaps retain the capacity of remembering a great deal more, but not through the organism. Moreover, until the organism is complete — that is to say, until the person concerned is grown up — the true entity is only immersed in it — if I may employ a materialistic illustration to suggest the idea which would be only fully expressible m metaphysical language of great elaboration — to a limited extent. The quite young child, as we ordinarily phrase it, is not a morally responsible being: that is to say, the organism has not attained a development in which the moral sense of the true entity can function through the physical brain and direct physical acts. But the young child is already marked out as in process of becoming the efficient habitat of the entity or soul that has begun to function through its organism; and, therefore, if we imagine that there are in the world living men — adepts in the direction of forces on the higher planes of Nature with which physical science is not yet acquainted — we shall readily understand the peculiar relations that exist between them and a child in process of growing up, and gradually taking into itself a soul that such adepts are already in relations with.

Let me repeat that this mere statement of the occult science view of human nature is not put forward as a proof that things are so; but simply because that theory of things will be found a continuous thread upon which the facts of Mme. Blavatsky's life are strung. It may be that, as the story goes on, some readers will develop other theories to account for them, but all I have to say would appear disjointed and incoherent without this brief explanation, while it becomes, at all events, clearly intelligible with that clue to its successive incidents.

In this way I proceed to assume, as a working hypothesis, that even in childhood Mademoiselle Hahn was under the protection of a certain abnormal agency capable even of producing results on the physical plane when in extraordinary emergencies these were called for. For example, I have more than once heard her tell a story of her childhood's days about a great curiosity she entertained in reference to a certain picture — the portrait of one of the ancestors of the family — which hung up in the castle where her grandfather lived, at Saratow, with a curtain before it. It hung at a great height above the ground in a lofty room, and Mademoiselle Hahn was a small mite at the time, though very resolute when her mind was set upon a purpose. She had been denied permission to see the picture, so she waited for an opportunity when the coast was clear, and proceeded to take her own measures for compassing her design. She dragged a table to the wall, and contrived to set another small table on that, and a chair on the top of all, and then gradually succeeded in mounting up on this unstable edifice. She could just manage to reach the picture from this point of vantage, and leaning with one hand against the dusty wall, contrived with the other to draw back the curtain. The effect wrought upon her by the sight of the picture was startling, and the momentary movement back upset her frail platform. But exactly what occurred she does not know. She lost consciousness from the moment she staggered and began to fall, and when she recovered her senses she was lying quite unhurt on the floor, the tables and chair were back again in their usual places, the curtain had been run back upon its rings, and she would have imagined the whole incident some unusual kind of dream but for the fact that the mark of her small hand remained imprinted on the dusty wall high up beside the picture.

On another occasion again her life seems to have been saved under peculiar circumstances, at a time when she was approaching fourteen. A horse bolted with her — she fell, with her foot entangled in the stirrup, and before the horse was stopped she ought, she thinks, to have been killed outright but for a strange sustaining power she distinctly felt around her, which seemed to hold her up in defiance of gravitation. If anecdotes of this surprising kind were few and far between in Mme Blavatsky's life I should suppress them in attempting to edit her memoirs, but, as will be seen later, they form the staple of the narratives which each person in turn, who has anything to say about her, comes forward to tell. The records of her return to Russia after her first long wanderings are full of evidence, given by her relatives, compared to which these little anecdotes of her childhood told by herself sink into insignificance as marvels. I refer to them, moreover, not for their own sake, but, as I began by saying, to illustrate the relations which appear to have existed in her early childhood between herself and those whom she speaks of as her “Masters”, unseen in body, unknown by her at that time as living men, but not unknown to the visions with which her child-life was filled.

In the narrative quoted above, it will have been seen that she was often noticed by her friends sitting apart in corners, when she was not interfered with, apparently talking to herself. By her own account she was at this time talking with playmates of her own size and apparent age, who to her were as real in appearance as if they had been flesh and blood, though they were not visible at all to anyone else about her. Mademoiselle Hahn used to be exceedingly annoyed at the persistent way in which her nurses and relatives refused to take any notice whatever of one little hunchback boy who was her favourite companion at this time. Nobody else was able to take notice of him, for nobody else saw him, but to the abnormally gifted child he was a visible, audible, and amusing companion, though one who seems to have led her into endless mischief. But amidst the strange double life she thus led from her earliest recollections, she would sometimes have visions of a mature protector, whose imposing appearance dominated her imagination from a very early period. This protector was always the same, his features never changed ; in after life she met him as a living man, and knew him as though she had been brought up in his presence.

Students of spiritualism, of occultism, of clairvoyance will find this record strangely confused at the first glance, but I think, by the light of what I have said above in reference to the occult theory of incarnation, people who hold that theory will be excused for thinking that they see their way through the entanglement pretty clearly. Mademoiselle Hahn was born, of course, with all the characteristics of what is known in spiritualism as mediumship in the most extraordinary degree, also with gifts as a clairvoyant of an almost equally unexampled order. And as a child, the time had not come at which it would have been possible for the occult protectors of the entity thus beginning to function in that organism to set on foot any of those processes of physical training by which such natural gifts can be tamed, disciplined, and utilised. They had to run wild for a time; thus we find Mademoiselle Hahn — looking at her childhood's history from the psychological point of view — surrounded by all, or a large number of the usual phenomena of mediumship, and also visibly under the observation and occasional guardianship of the authorities to whose service her mature faculties were altogether given over, to the absolute repression in after life of the casual faculties of mediumship.

Her friends were half-interested, half-terrified by those of her manifestations which they could understand sufficiently to observe. Her aunt says that from the age of four years “she was a somnambulist and somniloquent. She would hold, in her sleep, long conversations with unseen personages, some of which were amusing, some edifying, some terrifying for those who gathered around the child's bed. On various occasions, while apparently in the ordinary sleep, she would answer questions, put by persons who took hold of her hand, about lost property or other subjects of momentary anxiety, as though she were a sibyl entranced. Sometimes she would be missing from the nursery, and be found in some distant room of the mansion, or in the garden, playing and talking with companions of her dream-life. For years, in childish impulse, she would shock strangers with whom she came in contact, and visitors to the house, by looking them intently in the face and telling them that they would die at such and such a time, or she would prophesy to them some accident or misfortune that would befall them. And since her prognostications usually came true, she was the terror, in this respect, of the domestic circle.”