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One hundred years ago, a writer and attorney named Victoria Woodhull first met the charismatic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in New York. And, as they have since come to do in so many cases, they did not part good friends. Woodhull later explained in a letter to the publisher of her memoir: “I looked at her and saw a white elephant and wondered how I was ever to get through life with that obstinate ‘saint’ in it.” Today, we know that Blavatsky, a Russian-born occultist, had led the largest and most secretive of American spiritual communities, and that she possessed powers of mesmerism and other psychic gifts that enabled her to dramatically change her appearance from top to toe, just as she changed the course of history.
The dark history of Blavatsky and her coterie is the subject of a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jayne Martin. In this absorbing, and deeply personal account, the author explores the so-called “Blavatsky phenomenon” in its most intriguing and consequential manifestations. Blavatsky was so familiar with spiritual exercises and methods of divination that she could take two or three at the same time and seemed not to be troubled by them. But like all “saints” in her world, she also had her various quirks and prejudices and, as Martin reveals, longed for a man who could provide the love she would not find in herself.
Today, Blavatsky has acquired another, more visible and controversial avatar, as the self-proclaimed “Buddha of Bizarre Beliefs.” In recent years, she has helped the film director Oliver Stone craft a series of documentaries about the Blavatsky phenomenon. In one, Blavatsky is seen to have been influenced by Aleister Crowley and to have met him on more than one occasion. Stone’s portrayal of Blavatsky in this movie, as Martin reveals in her book, creates one of the most entertaining yet baffling stories in the history of American popular culture.
Blavatsky and a New York Prostitution Ring
For a woman who called herself the “Mahatma,” Blavatsky was remarkably ignorant about the sexual mores of her own time. Nor did she seem to care. “Not only was she herself the most voluptuous-
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