Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality

5. Fantasizing the Occult

95 During the London season of 1884, theosophy was in vogue. Interest in Eastern metaphysics had been mounting since 1881, when A. P. Sinnett had published letters from Koot Hoomi in The Occult World. The appetite for the supernatural was further whetted when, in 1883, Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism appeared. The following year, persons from “upper levels of society” gathered weekly at his home, which, according to Sinnett, “became the vortex of the whole movement.”1 That spring London society was abuzz when word spread that the founders of the Theosophical Society had arrived in England. Genuine inquirers, as well as the merely curious, sought glimpses of Blavatsky, dressed in black and rolling a tiny cigarette; of Olcott in oriental costume; and of Mohini Mohun Chatterji, with his large, soulful eyes. Often accompanying Blavatsky was a less exotic figure, a slender, attractive woman, bearing the soft accent of the American South. She was, it was rumored, a psychic who possessed unusual powers. This person was, of course, none other than Laura Holloway-Langford. This panoply of personalities, with their claims about mysterious sources of knowledge, attracted the imagination of writers who portrayed them in popular novels. Literary representations reveal how the public perceived this cast of characters, but they also express contested ideas about gender and sexuality . Victorians lacked an adequate language outside the vocabulary of religionandmoralitytodiscussrelationsbetweenmenandwomen,notto mention same-sex relationships. In fiction, however, these topics could be 5 Fantasizing the Occult S 96 front/backmatter 96 Yearning for the New Age exploredthroughplotandcharacterizationinwaysthatwereforbiddenin politeconversationandthatrarelyappearedinothertypesoftheosophical writing. Fiction could expose sexual exploitation; it could complicate the portrayal ofmasculinity and femininity; and itcould contest heterosexual norms. Even before the formation of the Theosophical Society, esoteric ideas had been transmitted through fiction. Hundreds of people attended lectures on theosophy, and many more read Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine; but far greater numbers, both in Europe and the United States,absorbedideasabouttheoccultthroughreadingpopularliterature, where they encountered new spiritual ideas and vocabulary. Yet it was not always easy to distinguish between occult fiction and other types of esoteric writing. Before they became fictional characters, Helena Blavatsky, Mohini Chatterji, and Laura Holloway-Langford had fashioned public personae.Blavatsky transgressed gender expectations, her personafluctuating between a woman of great spiritual power and an authoritative public presence that was perceived as masculine.2 Chatterji, with Blavatsky’s encouragement, played a part designed to exploit European Orientalism. LauraHolloway-Langfordcultivatedtheroleofaprofessionalpsychicand lent occult pursuits an air of middle-class respectability. In some sense, then, Blavatsky, Chatterji, and Holloway-Langford were imaginative creations well before they appeared in the pages of fashionable novels. This was doubly true of Koot Hoomi, who first came to life in the writing of A. P. Sinnett. THE CHARACTER OF KOOT HOOMI The prototype for theosophical fiction was an enormously popular book, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). Along with other writings by Bulwer-Lytton, this novel spread ideas about the existence of living adepts who preserved ancient wisdom, and it was influential in crystallizing Helena Blavatsky’s conception of the Mahatmas. In Isis Unveiled (1877), Blavatsky wrote: “No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description of these beings than Sir front/backmatter 97 Fantasizing the Occult 97 E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author of Zanoni.” She quoted approvingly long passages from the novel in which the character Mejnour, a member of an ancient brotherhood, gave instructions on how to penetrate the barrier that separates us from other worlds: The soul with which you listen must be sharpened by intense enthusiasm, purified from all earthly desires. . . . When thus prepared, science can be brought to aid it; the sight itself may be rendered more subtile, the nerves more acute, the spirit more alive and outward, and the element itself—the air, the space—may be made, by certain secrets of the higher chemistry, more palpable and clear. And this, too, is not magic as the credulous call it. . . . It is but the science by which nature can be controlled.3 In the novel, Blavatsky found confirmation that there existed “Oriental Fraternities,” whose members were small in number since “the slightest touch of mortal passion unfits the hierophant to hold communion with his spotless soul.” She wrote that Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni revealed that these Masters rarely share “knowledge of the most solemn importance” except for “the instruction of some neophytes.”4 A. P. Sinnett in The Occult...