Madame Helena Blavatsky

NEW Agers, hippies, druids and William Blake (who “conversed with the spiritual sun” there) have all claimed to draw divine sustenance from Primrose Hill. In her final year the occultist and philosopher Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) is also said to have found a measure of serenity from her walks around the Camden promontory.

Acclaimed as an enlightened guru by disciples but derided as a charlatan by her critics, she undeniably offered the first major intellectual, rather than religious, criticism of Darwinian evolution theory.

Blavatsky was a striking figure, conspicuous for her penetrating gaze, her “swarthy, Tartar aspect”, her chain-smoking of her hand-rolled cigarettes, her incessant swearing, and her own description of her manners as resembling those of “a Prussian grenadier on furlough”. Her version of her life story is exotic – but disputed by biographers.

Born Helena von Hahn at Ekaterinoslav near the Black Sea, as a teenager she was noted as being a brilliant horsewoman with a gift for languages and for playing the piano “in bursts of savage improvisation”.

In 1849, aged 17, she married the 40-year-old Nikifor Blavatsky, a Russian provincial vice-governor. She had no feelings whatever for her husband, seeing the marriage simply as a way out of a stifling family life. She insisted on remaining a virgin.

Bored by the frustrated Nikifor’s attempts on her purity, Helena absconded on a ship bound for Turkey. On arrival at Constantinople, she survived by winning the prize money in a steeplechase, riding a horse that already had killed two grooms.

After drifting across Egypt and Europe, she arrived in London in 1851 where she met an Indian prince in Hyde Park who told her that she had a great spiritual quest ahead of her, and that her secret lay in Tibet.

Despite this rather obvious clue, Madame Blavatsky set out on her journey of mystical discovery in the opposite direction, living with the Canadian indigenous tribes, investigating voodoo in New Orleans, then moving on through Peru, Sri Lanka and southern India. She returned via Singapore and Java to England in 1853 where she played piano with the London Philharmonic Society. She extended her travels to Japan where she met the Yamabushi Brotherhood, before finally reaching Tibet.

After four years in the Himalayas, she went home to Russia where her family and the local peasants said that she was “a haunted woman”, a medium whose mere presence provoked mysterious rapping and supernatural whispering. She dismissed these new powers as a nuisance and something of an embarrassment.

Travelling on again, pausing only to volunteer in Garibaldi’s campaign to liberate Italy (where she was wounded at the Battle of Mentana), she lived firstly with the Whirling Dervishes, then with Bedouin Arabs in Syria. Reappearing in Tibet in 1869, she studied with an Adept and gained entrance to the lama monasteries.

During the mid-1870s, using her experiences, Blavatsky started branches of her Theosophical Society (based on linking spiritualism with the Kabbala and Eastern religions) in both New York and London. Her teachings influenced many including Thomas Edison, WB Yeats and Mahatma Gandhi. However, despite his own wife’s involvement in the movement, Oscar Wilde injected a note of scepticism: “I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand.”

Also in Britain, Blavatsky found herself suffering from what she saw as a grave social embarrassment. She had been taught English as a child by a governess from Yorkshire who had passed on her strong accent. Blavatsky became very irritated when she saw her listeners struggling with suppressed laughter at the sound of her most solemn profundities being delivered with a broad Bradford intonation. Stung, she found a guru who taught her upper-class English by telepathy.

Later the Theosophist movement gained ground in India and Blavatsky bought an estate in Madras as a permanent headquarters.

Her opponents soon struck back though. Her American enemies claimed that she was a thoroughly debauched woman who had enjoyed sex with the Pope and with Otto von Bismarck. Which would have been news to her new husband, a New York Russian whom she had married under the impression that her first husband Nikifor was dead and this second one was wealthy. Both parties were disappointed, as the Russian was penniless and Helena still stoutly refused to consummate any marriage. They parted after four months.

A far more dangerous opponent appeared in the form of Mr Richard Hodgson of the British Society for Psychical Research, who came to India to investigate the Blavatsky phenomenon. In 1886 he published a report claiming that she was “one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history” and a Russian spy as well.

In what she described as her “black year”, news also arrived from Russia that Nikifor Blavatsky was not dead after all, and therefore Helena was a (virgin) bigamist.

In failing health, she left India for London in 1890 and moved into her admirer Annie Besant’s large house at 19 Avenue Road, near Primrose Hill. Blavatsky died during the influenza epidemic of 1891.

• Adapted from Neil Titley’s book The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip. For more details see www.wildetheatre.co.uk