The
Life of Madame Blavatsky
EDITED BY A.P. SINNETT
CHAPTER 3
AT HOME IN RUSSIA, 1858
IN the course of certain Personal and Family Reminiscences, put together by Mme de Jelihowsky, she explains the attitude of mind in which she was brought up, interesting both as bearing on the narrative she has to relate and also as connected with the family history of the subject of this memoir. She writes: —
“I was born and bred in a strictly orthodox, sincerely religious, yet far from being mystically-inclined, family. But if the spirit of mysticism had failed to influence its members, it was not in consequence of any predetermined policy of an a priori denial of everything unknown, or of a tendency to sneer at the incomprehensible only because it is far beyond one's capacities and nature to take it in; but as ' highly educated and polished people' can hardly be expected to confess their mental and intellectual failings, hence the conscious efforts of playing at incredulity and esprits forts. Nothing of the sort was to be found in our family. Nor was there any great superstition or bigotry amongst them — two feelings the best calculated to generate and develop faith in the supernatural. But when, at the age of sixteen, I had to part with my mother's family, in which I had been brought up since her death, and went to live with my father, I met in him a man of quite a different 'nature. He was an extreme sceptic, a deist, if anything, and one of a most practical turn of mind; a highly intellectual and even a scientific man, one who knew and had seen a great deal in life, but whose erudition and learning had been developed in full accordance with his own personal views, and not at all in any spirit of humility before the truths of Christianity, or blind belief in man's immortality and life beyond the grave.”
In 1858, when Mme. Blavatsky returned to Russia, her sister, the writer of the reminiscences from which I have just quoted, bore the name of Yahontoff — that of her first husband, who had died shortly before that date. She was staying at Pskoff with General N. A. Yahontoff — Maréchal de Noblesse of that place — her late husband's father. A wedding-party, that of her sister-in-law, was in progress, and Colonel Hahn was amongst the guests. On Christmas night, Mme. de Jelihowsky writes, “They were all sitting at supper, carriages loaded with guests were arriving one after the other, and the hall bell kept ringing without interruption. At the moment when the bridegroom's best men arose, with glasses of champagne in their hands, to proclaim their good wishes for the happy couple — a solemn moment in Russia — the bell was again rung impatiently. Mme. Yahontoff, Mme. Blavatsky's sister, moved by an irrepressible impulse, and notwithstanding that the hall was full of servants, jumped up from her place at the table, and, to the amazement of all, rushed herself to open the door. She felt convinced, she said afterwards, though why she could not tell, that it was her long lost sister! ”
For some time this memoir will closely follow Mme. de Jelihowsky's narrative, now translated into English for the first time, but it will be unnecessary to load every page with quotation marks. Where the first person is used, it will be understood that Mme de Jelihowsky is speaking, although she also frequently refers to herself in the third person, as the narrative was originally published in Russia anonymously. When I, the present editor, have occasion to intervene with comments, such passages will be enclosed in brackets.
Spiritism (or spiritualism) was then just looming on the horizon of Europe, During her travels, the psychological peculiarities of Mme. Blavatsky's childhood and girlhood had developed, and she returned already possessed of occult powers, which were in those days attributed to mediumship.
These powers asserted themselves in strange incessant knocks and raps and sounds, which many hearers mistook for the esprits frappeurs; in the moving of furniture without contact, in the increase and the decrease of the weight of various objects, in her faculty of seeing herself (and occasionally of transferring that faculty to others) things invisible to ordinary sight, and living but absent persons who had resided years ago in the places where she happened to be, as well as spectral images of personages dead at various epochs.
Well acquainted with a number of facts of the most striking character which have happened at that period of her life (which, however, has not lasted very long, as she succeeded very soon in conquering and even obtaining mastery over the influence of forces that surrounded her), I will describe only those phenomena of which I was an eye-witness.
For this I must return to the night of Mme. Blavatsky's arrival.
From that time all those who were living in the house remarked that strange things were taking place in it. Raps and whisperings, sounds, mysterious and unexplained, were now being constantly heard wherever the newly arrived inmate went. Not only did they occur in her presence and near her, but knocks were heard, and movements of the furniture perceived nearly in every room in the house, on the walls, the floor, the windows, the sofa, cushions, mirrors, and clocks ; on every piece of furniture, in short, about the rooms. However much Mme. Blavatsky tried to conceal these facts, laughing at them and trying to turn these manifestations into fun, it was useless for her to deny the fact or the occult significance of these sounds. At last, to the incessant questions of her sister, she confessed that those manifestations had never ceased to follow her everywhere as in the early days of her infancy and youth. That such raps could be increased or diminished, and at times even made to cease altogether, by the mere force of her will, she also acknowledged, proving her assertion generally on the spot. Of course the good people of Pskoff, like the rest of the world, knew what was then occurring, and had heard of spiritualism and its manifestations. There had been mediums in Petersburg, but they had not penetrated as far as Pskoff, and its guileless inhabitants had never heard the rappings of the so-called spirit.
[All who have become acquainted with Mme. Blavatsky in the present phase of her development will be aware of the eagerness with which she repudiates the least trace of mediumship as entering into the phenomena with which she had been associated in recent years. In 1858 she appears to have been in a transition state, already invested with occult will-power, which put her in a position to repress the manifestations of mediumship in emergencies, but still liable to their spontaneous occurrence when they were not thus under repression. Expressly asked the question, she would always deny that she was a medium — which, indeed, she would appear no longer to have been, in the strict sense of the term — for she does not seem to have been controlled by the agencies recognised in spiritualism, even when sometimes acquiescing in casual manifestations on their part. Mme. de Jelihowsky, questioned on this subject recently, says: “I remember that when addressed as a medium, she (Mme. Blavatsky) used to laugh and assure us she was no medium, but only a. mediator between mortals and beings we knew nothing about. But I could never understand the difference.”
This may be the best opportunity for bringing to the reader's notice some passages from Mme. Jelihowsky's Personal and Family Reminiscences which bear on the point, an important one as regards all psychic students of Mme. Blavatsky's phenomena and characteristics.
Her sister says :—
“Although everyone had supposed that the manifestations occurring in H. P. Blavatsky's presence were the results of a mediumistic power pertaining to her, she herself had always obstinately denied it. My sister H. P. Blavatsky had passed most of her time, during her many years' absence from Russia, travelling in India, where, as we are now informed, spiritual theories are held in great scorn, and the so-called (by us) mediumistic phenomena are said to be caused by quite another agency than that of spirits; mediumship proceeding, they say, from a source, to draw from which, my sister thinks it degrading to her human dignity; in consequence of which ideas she refuses to acknowledge such a force in herself. From letters received by me from my sister, I found she had been dissatisfied with much that I had said of her in my ' Truth about H. P. Blavatsky.' She still maintains, now as then, that in those days (of 1860) she was influenced as well as she is now by quite another kind of power — namely, that of the Indian sages, the Raj-Yogis — and that even the shadows (figures) she sees all her life, are no phantoms, no ghosts of the deceased, but only the manifestations of her powerful friends in their astral envelopes. However it may be, and whatever the power that produced her phenomena only, during the whole time that she lived with us at the Yahontoff such phenomena happened constantly before the eyes of all, believers and unbelievers (relatives and outsiders) — and they plunged everyone equally into amazement.”
As this memoir is a narrative and not an occult treatise, I refrain from any minute analysis of the psychological problem involved, and would only point out that the condition of things Mme. de Jelihowsky refers to, chimes in with the rough explanation I gave in the first chapter as to the occult theory of Mme. Blavatsky's development, which would recognise her natural born, physical attributes as only coming under control when the higher faculties of her real self, entering into union with the bodily organism as this reached maturity, put her in a position to be taught how to eradicate the weed-growth of her abnormally fertile psychic faculties.]
With the arrival of Mme. Blavatsky at Pskoff, the news about the extraordinary phenomena produced by her spread abroad like lightning, turning the whole town topsy-turvy.
The fact is, that the sounds were not simple raps, but something more, as they showed extraordinary intelligence, disclosing the past as well as the future to those who held converse through them with those Mme. Blavatsky called her kikimorcy (or spooks). More than that, for they showed the gift of disclosing unexpressed thoughts, i.e. penetrating freely into the most secret recesses of the human mind, and divulging past deeds and present intentions.
The relatives of Mme. Blavatsky's sister were leading a very fashionable life, and received a good deal of company in those days. Her presence attracted a number of visitors, no one of whom ever left her unsatisfied, for the raps which she evoked gave answers, composed of long discourses in several languages, some of which were unknown to the medium, as she was called. The poor “medium” became subjected to every kind of test, to which she submitted very gracefully, no matter how absurd the demand, as a proof that she did not bring about the phenomena by juggling. It was her usual habit to sit very quietly and quite unconcerned on the sofa, or in an arm-chair, engaged in some embroidery, and apparently without taking the slightest interest or active part in the hubbub which she produced around herself. And the hubbub was great indeed. One of the guests would be reciting the alphabet, another putting down the answers received, while the mission of the rest was to offer mental questions, which were always and promptly answered. It so happened, however, that the unknown and invisible things at work favoured some people more than others, while there were those who could obtain no answers whatever. In the latter case, instead of replying to queries asked aloud, the raps would answer the unexpressed mental thought of some other person, first calling him by name. During that time, conversations and discussions in a loud tone were carried on around her. Mistrust and irony were often shown, and occasionally even a doubt expressed, in a very indelicate way, as to the good faith of Mme. Blavatsky. But she bore it all very coolly and patiently, a strange and puzzling smile or an ironical shrugging of the shoulders being her only answer to questions of very doubtful logic offered to her over and over again.“But how do you do it, and what is it that raps ? ” people kept on asking. Or again, “but how can you so well guess people's thought ? How could you know that I had thought of this or that ? ”
At first H. P. B. sought very zealously to prove to people that she did not produce the phenomena, but very soon she changed her tactics. She declared herself tired of such discussions, and silence and a contemptuous smile became for some time her only answer. Again she would change as rapidly; and in moments of good-humour, when people would be foolishly and openly expressing the most insulting doubts of her honesty, instead of resenting them she used to laugh aloud in their faces. Indeed, the most absurd hypotheses were offered by the sceptics. For instance, it was suggested that she might produce her loud raps by the means of a machine in her pocket, or that she rapped with her nails; the most ingenious theory being that “when her hands were visibly occupied with some work, she did it with her toes.”
To put an end to all this, she allowed herself to be subjected to the most stupid demands ; she was searched, her hands and feet were tied with string, she permitted herself to be placed on a soft sofa, to have her shoes taken off and her hands and feet held fast against a soft pillow, so that they should be seen by all, and then she was asked that the knocks and rappings should be produced at the further end of the room. Declaring that she would try, but would promise nothing, her orders were, nevertheless, immediately accomplished, especially when the people were seriously interested. These raps were produced at her command on the ceiling, on the window sills, on every bit of furniture in the adjoining room, and in places quite distant from her.
At times she would wickedly revenge herself by practical jokes on those who so doubted her. Thus, for example, the raps which came one day inside the glasses of the young Professor M------, while she was sitting at the other side of the room, were so strong that they fairly knocked the spectacles off his nose, and made him become pale with fright. At another time, a lady, an esprit fort, very vain and coquettish, to her ironical question of what was the best conductor for the production of such raps, and whether they could be done everywhere, received a strange and very puzzling answer. The word, “Gold”, was rapped out, and then came the words, “We will prove it to you immediately”.
The lady kept smiling with her mouth slightly opened. Hardly had the answer come, than she became very pale, jumped from her chair, and covered her mouth with her hand. Her face was convulsed with fear and astonishment. Why ? Because she had felt raps in her mouth, as she confessed later on. Those present looked at each other significantly. Previous even to her own confession all had understood that the lady had felt a violent commotion and raps in the gold of her artificial teeth! And when she rose from her place and left the room with precipitation, there was a homeric laugh among us at her expense.
