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17 Chapter One The Undomesticated Occult In December 1885 the committee appointed by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to investigate “occult phenomena” in connection with theosophy published the results of a one-and-a-half-year-long study. The SPR report concluded that Mme. Blavatsky was to be regarded “neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress ; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”1 To reach this conclusion, the SPR committee had spent hundreds of hours gathering testimony from theosophists and crossexamining the most prominent members of the Theosophical Society in England. They had even sent an investigator, Mr. Richard Hodgson, B. A. of Cambridge, to the theosophists’ world headquarters in India. Employing methods worthy of his fictional contemporary Sherlock Holmes, Hodgson collected written and oral statements from both “European” and “native” informants, and amassed a wealth of physical evidence. He conducted a minute calligraphic examination of documents —tabulating instances of the “left-gap stroke” and the “clipped loose d” in order to prove forgery—and he pored over telltale stains or marks on clothes and furniture to find evidence of fraud. Hodgson concluded that whatever the status of the theosophists’ spiritual teachings , their claims to have verifiable evidence of the existence of supernatural powers and superhuman beings were completely fraudulent. On the basis of Hodgson’s findings, the leaders of the SPR—whose published opinions carried considerable intellectual weight and cultural prestige—dismissed Blavatsky as an ingenious imposter. In the years that followed this “exposure” of Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, however, Blavatsky’s following continued to grow. Her greatest literary success, The Secret Doctrine, which sealed her reputation as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest occult teachers, came three years later, in 1888. New lodges were founded, drawing hundreds of devotees, as well as the merely curious, to weekly meetings, and a new theosophical magazine, impudently named Lucifer, brazenly 18 domesticating the occult noted that the SPR condemnation had done the Theosophical Society a great service. In 1891, just days after Blavatsky’s death, the Pall Mall Gazette noted that even the Society for Psychical Research could not explain away the greatest of Blavatsky’s miracles: that “sincere and clever persons, intimate with Mdme. Blavatsky,” continued to “believe her incapable of deceit,” and that, contrary to all expectations, “the Theosophical Society grows weekly, runs several periodicals, and boasts thousands of disciples in both hemispheres.”2 Blavatsky’s appeal was that she promised to reconcile virtually all the oppositions of late Victorian society. What had attracted the interest of the Society for Psychical Research in the first instance was the promise of an empirically verifiable spiritual science. Blavatsky did not claim to defy science but to supersede it: the Theosophical Society’s motto, “There is no religion higher than truth,” reflected the effort to reconcile all religions, philosophies, and scientific systems in a higher synthesis. There was enough of the Enlightenment project here to suggest that theosophy offered a more modern religion as well as a more spiritual science. Blavatsky’s superior knowledge of natural law apparently allowed her to manipulate the laws of physics to produce what looked to the uninitiated like miracles: she could create the sound of “astral bells” or materialize a shower of roses out of thin air. But theosophy was also routinely condemned as un-Christian, unscienti fic and un-English—not a fit creed for persons of culture and breeding . This was because Blavatsky claimed to offer not only the certainty of science, but also the exotic glamour of a mystic East. Her powers were believed by her followers to be directly linked to ancient spiritual teachings transmitted to her by members of an Occult Brotherhood living in the “trans-Himalayan fastnesses of Tibet.”3 Since Tibet was in this period effectively closed to Europeans, knowledge of the country and its terrain was inevitably partial and fragmentary; for many late Victorians, Tibet was “mysterious Tibet,” and Blavatsky offered to solve that mystery.4 Manuscripts purportedly written by the Mahatmas who belonged to this brotherhood not only conveyed the teachings Blavatsky claimed as the basis of her powers, but also were offered as material evidence of the reality of occult phenomena. Prominent theosophists had claimed to receive letters from these Mahatmas, letters that had been transmitted across the Himalayas from Tibet to India at the speed...

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