By Punsara Amarasinghe –

Dr. Punsara Amarasinghe

Madam Blavatsky’s name is not strange for Sri Lankans as one of the early stalwarts to aspire to the Buddhist resurgence in the late 19th century. In the backdrop of British-sponsored Missionary activities, her audacity to stand with the natives in a British colony illustrates her compassion for the Easterners who suffered under foreign subjugation. After the tragic end of the 1883 Kotahena riots, Blavatsky defended the Buddhists, when the colonial government tried to frame them to be the culprits. In an article she authored for “The Theosophist“, Blavatsky argued that the arrogant attitude of the Christian priests and their condescending remarks over Buddhism sparked the riots in 1883 and the following year she accompanied Col. Henry Olcott to London to report the grievances faced by the Sinhalese Buddhists to the Colonial Secretary.

Blavatsky with some members of the Theosophical Movement

Yet underneath the interest, and respect she upheld towards Buddhism, Blavatsky’s persona remained uncanny. Although she observed Pancil on her arrival in Galle, she never adopted Buddhism as her creed. The riddle of Helena Petrova Blavatsky has been inexplicable for historians, scholars and even her biographers. Born to a noble family in the Russian empire in 1831, Blavatsky had a flair for occultism and alchemy since childhood as she devoted herself to reading books related to mystical traditions in her grand uncle’s library. In an era when travelling alone was taboo for women, Blavatsky showed a penchant for travelling to the Far East. Blavatsky’s maiden experience with Eastern mysticism emerged when she went to Astrakan, a Central Asian province of the Russian Empire. Inhabitants of Astrakan were the practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism and in her travel journals, Blavatsky often claimed to have visited Tibet.

World tour 

Before coming to Ceylon in the late nineteenth century, Blavatsky travelled extensively around many parts of the world including some distant places in the Middle East as well. In Cairo, she became acquainted with the Coptic Christian priests and Sufis. In Europe, she stood in solidarity with the Garibaldi, when Italian forces marched against Papal Rome. Her hobnobbing with freemasons, Christian mystics, Sufis and the Jewish Cabbala tradition culminated in her connections with some mystical characters called “ Mahatmas”. Notwithstanding her various claims in different accounts, it remains a mystery about the way how she contacted these characters as her claims often related to paranormal experiences beyond any empirical evidence.

Birth of Theosophy 

Madame H.P. Blavatsky was the direct agent of the Mahatmas. She was sent by them to establish a Society with the specific purpose of creating a core group for the Universal Brotherhood of humanity. This Society also aimed to promote the comparative study of world religions and philosophies, as well as to investigate unexplained laws of nature, psychic and spiritual faculties, and latent powers in mankind. Initially, Blavatsky spoke of the Mahatmas in private, but over time, the mysterious figures known as Koot Hoomi and Moorya established connections with other individuals such as Alan Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, and Col. Henry Steel Olcott. Another mysterious messenger for Blavatsky and her followers was St. Germain, an 18th-century European nobleman known as an alchemist.

Founding the Theosophical Society in 1875 was the paragon of her contribution to the mystical movements in a time, in which occultism continued to foster as a post-enlightenment reality. Blavatsky’s blended version of occultism was an idiosyncratic appeal filled with pantheistic beliefs and was a stark contrast to conventional Christianity. Blavatsky was hostile to Christianity as an organised religion, in effect, her harsh criticism always focused on the clergy and the institutions of Christianity. Theosophy intended to be her answer to institutional Christianity based on the array of occultist and mystical traditions she mastered during the wandering years.  Absorbing the doctrines from all the major religions encompassing ancient Tibetan Tantra and Vedanta, Blavatsky depicted Theosophy as a human quest to know the eternal truth, which is aptly illustrated by its famous slogan “ There is no higher religion than the truth “.  The symbol of Theosophy itself was akin to a wider representation of ancient wisdom and it attracted many Indian nationalists in the late 19th century.

A British Spy or a Russian Spy? 

Blavatsky was the first Russian woman to become a naturalised citizen of the USA, but this transformation did not save her from getting subjected to the West’s suspicion due to her Russian nationality. In India, British bureaucrats monitored her activities closely suspecting that she would exploit the internal vulnerabilities to favour Russian interests. British fear of Blavatsky resonated with their paranoia about a possible Russian invasion of India, which was romanticized by authors as the “ Great Game”. Her travel history to the Far East and the Middle East naturally aroused British suspicions about Blavatsky’d loyalties, which became more critical of her involvement in the Indian national movement with characters like Anne Bessant.  Contrary to the popular claim of labelling Blavatsky as a Russian spy, one of her biographers suggests that Blavatsky may have spied for both Russians and the British. In particular, some historians have pointed out that Blavatsky’s stay in India among the Indian nationalists intended to debilitate the Hindu-led nationalist movement in India.

Unlike the occultism presented before her, the discourse that Blavatsky propagated contained no direct theistic interpretation of the divine. In her masterpiece “Isis Unveiled,” she criticizes the Christian notion of a personal god by arguing that the name “Satan” has been misused in Christian theology. In this text, Blavatsky straightforwardly writes that Lucifer brought mankind spiritual wisdom and intellectual freedom. Like the Romantics, she draws a parallel between Satan and Prometheus. In her second important work, “The Secret Doctrine,” Blavatsky points out the Jewish Kabalistic interpretation of Satan as an antagonist force, which is necessary to the vitality, development, and vigor of the principle of good. Professor Per Faxneld from Stockholm University speculates that Blavatsky’s sympathy for the term “Satan” was an effort that Blavatsky made to espouse a counterculture against 19th-century Christian dogma. Even though she was not a proclaimed Satanist, her thoughts influenced 20th-century occultists like Aleister Crowley in perceiving evil.

Declared a charlatan 

Besides all these given merits, Blavatsky’s credibility reached the nadir when the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge declared her a fraud. However, this exposure could not completely ebb her impacts on 20th-century spiritualism as many scholars tend to portray Blavatsky as a mentor for many to seek ancient wisdom. The Theosophical movement founded by her along with Olcott became a cosmopolitan movement that acquired adherents around the world, where it flourished independently and had a life beyond society.

Her interest in Ceylon extended beyond Buddhism, and some argue that Blavatsky saw Lanka as a remnant of a lost civilization known as “Lemuria.” Despite the nearly 600 biographies written about Madam Helena Petrova Blavatsky, none of the biographers have uncovered the secrets of Blavatsky or the motivations behind her establishment of Theosophy. Was she gifted with spiritual abilities to communicate with Mahatmas? These questions remain unanswered and await further exploration.

*Author is the joint secretary of Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka