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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy, it's the best month of the year. I know it's your absolute favorite. It is. I mean, I in my heart, it's October every day, but now we're in October, which means Halloween is content.

And for this October, we're doing kind of an on ramp topic because it's a subject that I know you and I have both been kind of mentally prowling around for a bit. It is Madame Blavatsky who is said to have gone simply by her initials of EPB. I have a hard time saying that. So I'm going to stick to her regular name.

Yeah, I like the name she was known by in all of her work around the English speaking world. We're not going to try to, like, recreate her Russian name in Russian because that's like not how she was known here. Right. And Blavatsky is a figure that is iconic in a number of ways. She was the founder of the Theosophical movement. She lived a life of adventure that is hard, very hard to believe, frankly. We'll talk a little bit about the likely embellishment of some of her life story.

And you could also make the case that she in many ways set the image that persists to this day in pop culture of the fortune teller clad in flowing garments and fringe. She tended to play up her otherness as she traveled through the world to make a name for herself and to make a living. She is a polarizing figure to this day. There are still people that are scholars of her work and still people that are very vested in disproving her work.

But the important thing is that the impact of her work is still felt in the world, whether you believe her to have been a genuine mystic or a total fraud. So we are tackling Madame Blavatsky after many years of kind of looking at it and being like lady later.

Yeah, well, that also when we were we have each had time away from the office recently and it was like we were trying to get a handle on what was coming up on the show. So one of us didn't do the same thing, is the other one while the other one was out and not reachable. And you sent me your list over and I was like, Oh, I'm so glad this is finally on there.

Well, and it worked out well because, you know, this is a it's a longer episode in part because there's a lot of her story for her. And her life is is in some ways well documented. It in other ways, very fuzzily documented. Picking it apart is quite tricky. But I also wanted to try to read as many different sources and biographies as I could, because as we know and we've talked about before, some will be favorable to a subject, some will not.

Some will fall in the middle. And you kind of have to develop a sense of pattern recognition to see like what is consistent biography to biography and what seems like biographer bias. And so in her case, that's a really big part of the research, is just kind of trying to suss out the bias versus the actual. Yeah, I'm literally putting your quotes around actual facts because you'll see it starts right from the beginning.

The life of Madame Blavatsky was just a tangle of intensity right from her birth.

She was born Elena Petrovna VanHorn and what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She was born August 12th, eighteen thirty one.

And she was born prematurely in the middle of a cholera epidemic. So that's already a lot. Elena's mother, Elena Andreyev Navon Harn, was still a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth and both of them were not expected to live. A priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before she was expected to die. And so then Elena's aunt, Nadia, who was also a child at the time, accidentally set the priest robes on fire with a candle that she was holding.

This is so much in a birth story, right? There's just a lot going on. Elaina's German father, Peter Van Horn, was a captain in the Royal Horse Artillery. He was in Poland when all of this happened. So he missed all of the, you know, sort of grave happenings, but also the wackiness with the the child setting a priest on fire accidentally. He actually did not meet his daughter for six months to a year, depending on the source.

You look at accounts swerve around quite a bit on that point.

So, of course, she did not die in infancy. She was also descended from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess Elena Pavlovna Dolgarrog QOF and defied convention of the day. She educated herself in everything from Greek language to botany. Elena. Seventeen year old mother also. Survived the delivery and became a novelist shortly after that, sometimes she's been called the Russian George softened because of the similarity of the themes in her work to that of our previous podcast subject. So Young.

Elena grew up in a household of women who really valued writing and learning.

Yeah, her mother's novels are largely about women who are in marriages that do not hold enough romance or happiness for them, much like a lot of short songs work.

But though Elena was born into the aristocracy and had a really positive role models in terms of education for women, Elena's life as a child was not really what you would call idyllic. Her father's military career meant that they moved frequently and there are wildly different assessments of what her relationship with her mother was like. Some indicate that the elder Elena was generally unhappy with her life and the constant moving and would have been very pleased to just break free of her family obligations entirely.

Other accounts suggest that mother and daughter were, in fact, quite close.

At one point, Peters orders took the family to St. Petersburg and the elder Elena was finally happy. So much so that when the orders came to leave, she refused to go. The Bosnians were separated for a while. During this period, though, she did take her two daughters on a thousand mile journey with their grandfather to Astrakhan, which was at the mouth of the Volga River.

The family patriarch was traveling for work, and the young Elaina was exposed to Tibetan Buddhism there for the first time later in life. She would describe this as having made a really lasting impression on her. Yeah, I didn't dig into it here, but most biographers make the point of, like, her mother was so happy to be in a city and in St. Petersburg that she refused to move with her father. But then she took her kids out of St.

Petersburg and went on what was actually a very long, arduous journey. So it kind of points to the fact that maybe she just didn't want to be with Peter, who maybe wanted to break. Yeah. By the time Elena was nine, her parents were back together and the family was then living in Odessa. But at this point, the elder Harlina, who had never really enjoyed robust health, was sick and she was getting worse when she was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis during a pregnancy.

A doctor moved in with the family full time. And that baby, a son named Leonid, was born in June 1840 and he was actually the family's second son. They had had a boy named Sasha who had died in infancy several years earlier. And you may have have noticed that we reference two daughters a little bit ago. And that's because at that point, there was already a second daughter. Her name was Vera. And Helena Andreyevna survived the birth of her fourth child despite her illness.

But despite every treatment that the family's wealth and connections could arrange for her, she did not live a whole lot longer. She died in 1842 at the age of just 28. And in an apocryphal story, her last words to her daughter were that she would not live a life like other women and that she would suffer a great deal. This is something that Blavatsky would say throughout her life. Helena, her sister Vera and her brother Leonid were sent to live with their grandparents.

That sort of trappy sentiment that Helena was not like other girls was something that was really part of the way the family described her from her youth. Her sister, Vera, described her as being singularly strange and most description's talk about her having a duality to her personality. On the one hand, she was really rebellious and stubborn and liked to play unkind pranks and kind of talk back to adults.

And on the other, she was bookish, deeply interested in the metaphysical, and really obsessed with hiding in the many tunnels and other strange hideaways that were part of their grandparents house in the city of Saratov on the Volga River.

And this is also the point in the timeline where the stories of her unusual paranormal abilities are rooted. So according to family stories, which are of course not verifiable, Helena would play with what seemed to be ghosts, and she would sleepwalk into the unused passages of the House and developed the ability to put birds to sleep using something that she called Solomon's Wisdom. We don't know what that was. There is literally nothing that tries to explain what Solomon's was worth.

And of course, the family lawyer around Helena mentions her fascination with the dead from the time she was a child, once the children had relocated to Saratov.

And we're just not constantly moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore.

Their education settled into a more consistent and formalized structures. But even so, and in spite of coming from a pretty progressive family in terms of women in education, this was largely about preparing her to be an aristocratic wife. So she was learning, French said. Art and music, but things like math and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope, she was supposed to learn how to be very pretty and quiet and to be able to entertain her husband with talks of culture, but not really anything else.

And there are a lot of stories of the ways in which Helena, in her early years, comes into contact with the occult and the mystical just before her own deeper connection to that world is said to have manifested. So she allegedly learned about B communication and plants that had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as a surf on the family property. His name is listed as Beranek Bujak, and while traveling with her grandparents, she was again exposed to a number of other cultures and ideas and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism in particular.

She also started to mention a protector that she saw in her dreams during her late childhood. And she described this protector, which was her name for him as a tall man from India. There were several accidents that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention of this protector figure. Yeah, in one instance, she had stacked a table with other furniture and climbed it to get a look at a portrait that was high on the wall of her grandparents home.

There's a whole layer to this story where the portrait is covered with a curtain and nobody wants anybody to see it. And so that makes it more alluring. And we don't ever find out what the portrait is. But but when she peeked behind it to the forbidden painting, whatever it was, was either so shocking or startling that she passed out and fell from this giant stack of furniture. And she claimed that when she came to everything was back where it belonged to, all of the furniture had been put back in its proper place.

And the only evidence of her clandestine climb was a handprint that she had left high on the wall and on a dusty surface. And then on another occasion, she was thrown from a horse and she said that her protector had appeared and saved her by holding her head so it did not impact on the ground.

There's also a sort of incongruous piece of travel information that comes up around the same time that she started seeing this protector later in life. She mentioned having gone to England with her father when she was 12 or 13. There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated by her sister's diary at the time.

So historians tend to be of two views on this sort of strange stand out piece in the whole Madame Blavatsky puzzle. Either it never happened or it happened. But she recalled the timeline incorrectly in this trip really took place closer to 1850 when she was 17 or 18 instead of 12 or 13.

There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is and when accepting all of these stories, of course, requires a bit of faith because there isn't a way to corroborate the appearance of a spirit that only appears to one person or even to verify simple events that are part of family history but have no actual record. Right. We don't know if she was thrown from a horse. No one would have, like, recorded that in any way. We don't know if she climbed this table full of things and was somehow protected and cleaned up after by a friendly spirit because like there's not like anybody files a report on that.

When it came to this particular, Helena also didn't seem content to just use the idea as a means of explaining the unexplainable. As a teenager, she became really fixated on studying what exactly was at work when strange events happened around her. So she read, according to her own account books on Alchemy, Magic and the Occult. These had been part of her great grandfather's royal library and included in these volumes, there was even a book by the previous podcast subject German.

If that account is actually true, reading the work of other explorers of the unknown gave her this base of knowledge that she then used as her jumping off point with her own mystical and philosophical explorations.

Helena's teenage years were a time full of significant change, as is pretty normal for a teenager, although hers is not always that normal. We're going to delve into that after we first pause for a sponsor break. Nine Super Bowl appearances, six Super Bowl championships, the New England Patriots of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are the greatest dynasty in NFL history. I'm Gary Myers, NFL sports journalist for over 40 years. Join me for a new podcast, The Goat, Tom Brady.

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The coach, Tom Brady, is available now. Listen and follow on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is the secret syllabus podcast. I remember the good old times when I was a college student and then 20, 20 hit. Hi, I'm Hannah Ashton. And I'm Katy Tracy. We're here to fill in everything they missed in our college curriculum, just like you were confronting the unknown.

And if we're being honest, we need all the advice we can get.

Listen to the secret syllabus on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. See you after class. When Elaina was 15, her life shifted once again, her grandfather's appointment as governor of Saratoga ended. And at that point, Helena Veera and Leonhard first spent a year with an aunt before joining their grandparents in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, which was called Tiflis at the time.

As she turned 16, Helena had started to speak about a double life that she was leading. One was her normal everyday life, and the other was her astral life. She also made the acquaintance of Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who was similarly interested in the mystical and had traveled the world seeking out experts and practitioners of various occult and magical activities. Golitsyn is said to have encouraged Jelena's interest in this secondary spiritual life and specifically advised her to travel the same way that he had to learn more about the unknown when Elina was 17.

There was once again a sudden change in her circumstance, but this time in the form of a marriage seemingly out of nowhere, she said. Nikifor Blavatsky, a man in his 40s who is vice governor of the Aravena province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. There are some theories that she may have just run off and gotten married as an act of rebellion against her father or her governess, who she was having some conflict with.

And again, that depends on the source you read. It also might have been a hastily arranged marriage made by the family in the hopes of tethering the increasingly restless Helena to her home in some way. But in later years, she herself also said that Nikifor, unlike a lot of the men closer to her age, never mocked her interest in the mystical and would talk to her about things that he had learned in other places and cultures that might interest her as she studied such matters.

This was not a good match, though. Elena got cold feet before the wedding even happened and she tried to back out. She vanished for several days and there were rumors that she had met up with Golitsyn, but she returned from wherever she had gone in time for the wedding.

That wedding took place on July 7th, 1849, and she said to have refused to do the vow of honoring and obeying her new husband. But otherwise the ceremony did go as planned. According to Helena, though, this marriage was never consummated and will come back to this.

No sooner was this wedding over than Helena began a series of attempts to run away from her new husband and her new life. She and Nikifor lived in the palace of Sarda and Aravena, and she spent a great deal of time, it seems, evading guards who wished she would just stay put. Eventually, she did manage to get past the guards, and she ran back to her family in Tiflis. And at that point the decision was made to ship her off to her father and see if that might help.

But she purposely missed the boat and then bribed a different boat captain to take her to Kerch. She traveled with two members of her family's household staff and assured them that she was still planning to rendezvous with her father. Then she gave them the slip. Similarly, after some issues with the captain of the English ship, the Commodore, which was the captain she had bribed, she ran away again. The captain's boat was boarded by Harbor Police who were looking for this runaway aristocrat.

And while she managed to evade capture by dressing as a cabin boy, the captain probably did not like all of this fuss. Soon she was gone and this was the start of just a wild decade. The next nine years of Helena Blavatsky life are very murky. She did not trust her family not to send her back to her husband if she told them where she was. So she didn't, with the possible exception of her father, who might have occasionally been sending her money.

And because of the cloak and dagger nature of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about just what she was up to during those years of travel around Blavatsky Zohn accounts of this period of her life shifted and changed over the years, sometimes in ways that contradicted one another or created impossibilities.

In terms of the timeline, the first place that Madame Blavatsky explored was Constantinople. Later, she shared that it was here that she met opera singer Igati Petrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left for dead in the street, Blavatsky stood watch over him with a pistol to ward off anybody who had ill intent while waiting for somebody to help her arrange for him to get help. She did find some non nefarious help eventually, and Mitrovic was treated and recovered. The two of them remained friends for the remaining two decades of the singer's life.

Helena is also said to have made the acquaintance of the Countess Sofia Kiselev in Constantinople, who she traveled with for several months, often disguised. As a young man, they went to Egypt and Greece together before heading to Eastern Europe, Mitrovic and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe. Mitrovic wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the two were married. Now, this is all very blurry. We don't know if this was like, I'm your friend.

I'm going to tell your grandparents that, like, we're together now and explain this to your husband or if he really thought they were getting married.

It's again, everything murky, murky, murky. But we do know that by the early 1950s, Blavatsky was first in Paris and then in London and in England, she had what she claimed was a significant spiritual experience. She met a man from India who she claimed to already know. Remember that protector from her childhood? She said that this man, who she called Master Morea sometimes she'll just call him the master, was one and the same. And the specifics around exactly when and where she met him shifted in her own accounts.

She told different people that she had seen him in a crowd first and recognized him others that she had met him at Waterloo Bridge when she was considering suicide. Another version was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition and also that she met him in the seaside town of Ramsgate. But all of these versions, even though they are different, include his seeking her out to tell her that she must spend several years in Tibet before trying to make a path to Tibet, though she headed to Canada.

She was inspired by the writing of James Fenimore Cooper to seek out First Nations peoples Telnaes encounters. Disappointing, though, and she attributed this disappointment to the indigenous population having been exposed to Christian missionaries. There's some layers here, there are so many layers, and she's very problematic when it comes to her interactions with people of other cultures. Because she does that thing where she simultaneously fetishizes them and criticizes the heck out of them as not being what she wanted them to be, it's very problematic.

But after this time in Canada, she is said to have moved south to New Orleans and then into Texas before leaving North America for India. And she made it to India. She stayed in Bombay first for two years. And it said that during this time, Masters of Ancient Wisdom also told her to go to Tibet to learn about the integration of science, religion and philosophy. But she couldn't really make her way into Tibet. That was tricky at this time.

Europeans not so much welcome, Tibet was very closed off at this point, she decided to head back to England once she got there, she had quite the tale of her journey. She claimed that the ship she was on had wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope and that she was one of 21 survivors. After allegedly meeting with the master again in the home of someone she says she didn't know. Helena Blavatsky made her way to North America again. Yeah, this is the point in her story where I was like, she's lost all sense of even grounding her tales in any sort of reality, like this whole, oh, I took a ship from India and it was shipwrecked.

21 of us survived. There's no account of how she got back to Europe from that point. Yeah, it's a little bit a little bit kooky. But she landed in New York and then she headed west first to Chicago and then to Salt Lake City. And from there, she moved on to San Francisco, where she boarded a steamer to Japan. From there, it was on to India, and this time with the help of a guide and disguised herself, she claimed to have entered Tibet in 1856.

At last, the timeline of her travels was written up and published by Blavatsky in the Moscow Chronicle under the pen name Rada by from Tibet. She was eventually ordered by the mysterious master to travel back to Europe.

All of this is disputed. It's entirely possible that she was just hanging out in Europe this whole time. As Holly said earlier, Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans. She might have managed to gain access to Tibet if she was traveling with one of the people that she name checked as a spiritual master from the surrounding area. But I mean, these are kind of long odds on this. There's just never been any corroborating information for these claims. But while the years from 1849 to 1850 are really only known by what Blavatsky said she did, we do know that she was back in Russia with her family on Christmas, 1858.

Once again, the family noted the strange phenomena that seem to always surround her.

Elena went back to her husband, Nikifor, in 1862, but Aguardiente Petrovitch then showed up in Tiflis not long after claiming his own rights as her husband.

This whole thing is really messy and unclear. And then to confuse the situation further, she adopted a boy named Yuri with Nikifor. The couple didn't stay together. Yuri died at the age of five and was buried as Yuri Petrovich. Near his actual parentage is also a matter of debate. Madame Blavatsky said that this was the out of wedlock son of her sister in law. And bear in mind, or if rumors arose and continued that he was actually the child of Helena and Mitrovic.

Yeah, it's a big it's a big cluster and mystery. We don't know. There's so many. I feel like she was so good at creating such a pastiche of confusing details about her life that no one could untangle them would be like, wait, this doesn't add up. In 1864, Blavatsky had a horse riding accident that actually left her in a coma for several months. And she said that when she came out of that coma, her paranormal abilities had been fully actualized.

After this, she was once again on the move throughout Europe before once again receiving instructions from the master to go to Constantinople, then India and into Tibet. Again, all unsubstantiated.

We were about to get to the phase of Blavatsky life where she became associated with spiritualism. Before we get into that, let's take a quick break and hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. In the 1970s, Blavatsky became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a long time listener to the podcast, you may recall that the modern spiritualist movement is usually cited as beginning with the Fox sisters and their claims of communication with spirits.

In 1848, previous hosts and the did a whole episode on their story. So by the time Helena Blavatsky became connected to it, spiritualism had been getting attention, particularly in the United States for a couple of decades and had grown very popular, even though it also had plenty of doubters right from the beginning. And although Madame Blavatsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not 100 percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involves communication with the souls of the deceased.

She didn't believe that events like seances were making contact with the dead, but instead that the entities being reached were Elementals or Shel's, not actual souls. She did really love a science, though. Oh, she certainly did, because that was part of her fully actualized paranormal abilities after she came out of that coma was that she could contact other realms through sciences, and it is through her work conducting sciences that she met the man who would become one of her greatest admirers and most enthusiastic collaborators.

Madame Blavatsky had made her way back to North America by 1873. She was living in New York City at the time, and she was actually kind of struggling to get by. She was working in a sweatshop, making artificial flowers to support herself. And then she met Henry Steel Olcott at a science in Vermont.

Olcott was in a lot of ways the last person you would expect to have responded positively to spiritualism. He had served in the U.S. Army during the American Civil War. He had a career as a lawyer working on fraud cases. And by the time he met Blavatsky, he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself at Blavatsky Science because he was conducting investigative research into what a lot of people suspected were not spiritual experiences at all, but the work of charlatans.

Allcott had already written a number of articles about spiritualism and what was becoming more and more fascinated by it. You know, there's a whole story about the farm that they're at, which was run by these people that were having seances and making money off of it, like they were charging entry fees and booking spiritualists to come in and do these. I want to call them performances. But these events. But even before the science began, Allcott could not help but notice Ilina, who stood out in the farming town of Chittenden, Vermont, her manner of dress, including a bright red tunic and a fur tobacco pouch, her many rings, her blonde curly hair, which Olcott described as like the fleece of a Cotswold you and the fact that he overheard her speaking French to a friend all drew the journalist in.

He was completely fascinated. Here's how he wrote of her later. Quote, This lady, Madame Helen P. Blavatsky, has led a very eventful life, traveling in most of the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples, and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior of Africa. The adventures she has encountered, the strange people she has seen, the perils by sea and land she has passed through would make one of the most romantic stories ever told by a biographer.

And the whole course of my experience, I never met. So interesting, and if I may say without offense, eccentric, a character all kind of endorsement when a really long way in terms of validating Blavatsky his personal story. And he also called her, quote, a lady of such social position as to be incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters to deceive the public. She was like all in he believed everything she said without fact checking.

It seemed the science that Olcott witnessed sounds a little more like a stage show. Various spirits made appearances, as in showing up on stage a Native American woman, a man from the country of Georgia, the spirit of a German man, and the French Canadian father of one of the attendees who gave responses to questions posed in French by making rapping noises and in one instance is said to have audibly uttered the word way.

A journalist writing for the Smithsonian, Edward Howar, described Allcott as having one of the most dramatic midlife crises in history and his relationship with Blavatsky. Some takes on their relationship suggests that Madame Blavatsky was a home wrecker who caused. Alcott's divorced, he was actually already estranged from his wife and in the legal proceedings to end that marriage before the two of them met, rumors of an affair between the two of them persisted, though, in part because he moved in with her when they both got back to New York.

Even so, while Blavatsky and Allcott may have been emotionally very intimate, it really does seem unlikely that they had a romantic relationship, at least not one that manifested physically. We mentioned that Helena always said her first marriage was never consummated, and she claimed later in life that she had never had a sexual relationship with anyone. She generally described herself in a way that today might be categorized as asexual. She once said, quote, I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain.

But she and Allcott tended to refer to one another as chum. So they were close. But her characterization is a mistress who lured him away from his wife really doesn't quite track. Allcott, by the way, was known to have had mistresses. He sounds like something of a ladies man, but it doesn't appear that Blavatsky was one of them. Allcott was a major boon to Madame Blavatsky public persona through his writing, as well as a source of financial support.

Their shared apartment became an epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely hosted seances and discussions of the paranormal. Their Blavatsky would invite journalists to visit so they would see that she was no trickster, just merely a woman who was in touch with other realms. And it was in this haven for discussion of the paranormal and a cult that Colonel Henry Olcott suggested that they formalize their gatherings under an official organization that could study all of the mystical and spiritual subjects that they were all interested in.

And this marks the beginning of the Theosophical Society, which sought to create an identity for itself that was separate from the spiritualist movement.

And to help shape that identity, Elena began writing one of the numerous reasons that Blavatsky was and remains a figure of controversy is really clear in her writing from this period she published her book, ISIS, unveiled in 1877. Allcott edited it and she leveled a lot of criticism at both organized religion and the scientific community. She thought that both groups were missing the real path to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy, according to Helena Blavatsky, was the answer, and it was to quote her, quote, the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy.

It was a way to bring those three disciplines together. This book was both praised and panned, and Blavatsky put all of the reviews into a scrapbook.

ISIS unveiled is something of a hodgepodge. It borrows from religions all over the world, pulling in ideas which Blavatsky adapted from memory, although she claimed that it was largely dictated to her telepathically by masters of ancient and secret knowledge. Its deepest roots are in Jelena's versions of Buddhism and Hinduism. But she incorporated so many varied ideas because she envisioned Theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs. Although Madame Blavatsky had managed to amass a following in the United States, it didn't really sustain itself.

And as her influence and the members of the Theosophical Society fizzled out, she and Allcott decided to move on and supporting Blavatsky and touting her gifts. He had really squandered his good name among his fellow journalists in the United States who had really just taken some mocking him openly about it.

You know, he kind of tanked his career to prepare to leave with an eye towards India. Helena Blavatsky became a U.S. citizen, and the thinking here was that if things went badly overseas, she would have the protection of the consulate in India. She and the colonel also sold off all of their belongings. They cleared out their cool apartment. And on December 17th, 1878, they left the U.S. for India more specifically than simply going to India. Though Allcott and Blavatsky intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with the Arius Samaj, which was a Hindu reform movement that had started in 1875.

Allcott and Blavatsky were novelty's in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism and they embraced Eastern religious ideas. And in doing so they kind of became media darlings for a time through a spiritualist named Alfred Percy Sinnett, who edited a British newspaper that published in India.

The founders of the Theosophical Society were booked at seances throughout British society that lived in Bombay. At the time, colonialism seemed to be a little more palatable if that meant it led to paying gigs for them. These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sennett's wife, for example, mentioned a lost Brutsch that she longed to find, Blavatsky told her it had rematerialize in her flowerbeds those flower beds were dug up and lo the Brutsch. She is also said to have produced a spray of roses in midair, which fell on the heads of people in the room.

When a visitor said that she could not produce a miracle, Allcott and Blavatsky set up their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay. In 1879, Madame Blavatsky became the editor of their periodical The Theosophist, which was the role she would have for the next nine years. Allcott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures. He spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity and on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of course still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame Blavatsky publicly took Buddhist vows.

Allcott took a deep interest in Salon and contributed to the Buddhist community there in a variety of ways, from opening schools to writing religious study texts to designing a flag which is still in use today. He also started working as a healer. He believed that magnetism had curative properties and that he could manipulate it to administer to all manner of ailments. While the beginning of Blavatsky and Alcott's time in Bombay and Ceylon was joyous, the tides eventually turned. The members of the Theosophical Society asked Allcott to stop healing people.

The public version of the story was that they felt like it was depleting his energy. But there was also likely some kind of Ersin about it being problematic. Then Allcott and Blavatsky became embroiled in a dispute with a woman that they had taken under their wing as a medium named Emma Columb started to hold obviously fake seances to make easy money. Next, the head of the Aria Samaj denounced theosophy very publicly as he believed the incorporation of all faiths was not in line with his group's ideology.

He had come to view Foskey and Allcott as untrustworthy.

Yeah, he had pamphlets written up talking about how he had changed his mind and believed that they were charlatans and things only got worse from there. Alfred Percy Sinnett, who we mentioned just a little while ago, had published a book of letters, and these letters were alleged to have come from the Masters that Madame Blavatsky knew. But one of them was obviously plagiarized from an American periodical and someone recognized it. And so the press, which had initially welcomed the Theosophists, turned on Blavatsky.

They first started to question her legitimacy as a psychic, and soon she was just flat out accused of being a fraud. In all the papers, she and Allcott moved their headquarters from Bombay to Madras in 1882 to get away from the controversy that worked for a while. But within a few years, there was another much bigger controversy. McCollum, who had been doing this fake seances, published a series of letters in a Madras periodical. She said they were written to her by Helena Blavatsky.

They clearly instructed her to create fake, miraculous and paranormal events to support their various stories. Blavatsky and Allcott dismissed these letters as fakes, but they found themselves viewed with just a whole new level of suspicion.

Yeah, there's a really fun story in there about making a life size doll that they kind of like weird puppeteering in like darkness to try to convince people they were being visited by the Masters that Blavatsky often referenced.

There's some very fun and kooky theatricality to it, and that is how the London Society for Psychical Research came to open an investigation into Blavatsky and that the esophageal society that investigation, which was conducted by Richard Hodgson, was aided by none other than Emma Coulomb, who showed how, among other things, the miracle of things like letters dropping into visitors laps, seemingly from thin air, was actually achieved through a bit of theatrical trickery. There was a thread and hook system in the ceiling.

A handwriting expert was also called upon to weigh in on whether the letters that Culham had provided as as evidence of Madame Blavatsky. S treachery were indeed written by Blavatsky. We have talked on the show before about some of the problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at the time.

In 1885, parapsychologists Richard Hodgson filed his report, which concluded the Blavatsky was a fraud. Allcott was found to merely have been incredibly gullible. After the Hodgson report Blavatsky left India. Although she continued to edit the Theosophist, the damage of this report was far reaching, in addition to discrediting Blavatsky in a very public way and also sowed some conflict between her and. Allcott When Helena Blavatsky filed a slander suit against Richard Hodgson and the Society for Psychical Research, Allcott did not support that.

He instead wanted to just let things die down the way they had in the past. To Helena, this really felt like a betrayal. It essentially ended their partnership and their friendship.

Madame Blavatsky, who was quite ill at the time due to a problem with her liver, took a steamer to Europe and despite the apparent seriousness of her health when she left India, she did make a recovery. After spending some time in Belgium, she established the Blavatsky Lodge of London in 1887, and in 1888, she released the work that she's probably most well known for, which is called The Secret Doctrine. And that was a comprehensive look at theosophy while she was writing this book.

She had shifted focus away from the paranormal and wrote more extensively about philosophy. The book's subhead is There is No Religion Higher than Truth and the introduction. And Blavatsky makes her goal clear. Quote, The aim of this work may be the stated to show that nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms and to assign the man his rightful place in the scheme of the universe to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions to uncover to some extent the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of nature has never been approached by the science of modern civilization.

In 1889, she published two more books. The Voice of Silence has the subtitle translated from the Book of the Golden Precepts, which shares a common origin with the secret doctrine. The rules and ethics presented here contrasts the two paths of spiritual attainment, the one pursued by those seeking knowledge for their own enlightenment, the other chosen by those whose aspirations are prompted by compassion for all.

Her other book to come out that year was key to Theosophy being a clear exposition in the form of question and answer of the ethics, science and philosophy for the study of which the Theosophical Society has been founded, even though these were very popular and they continued to actually be printed. They were her really final achievements. Madame Blavatsky died on May 8th, 1891, at the tail end of an influenza epidemic, and that date of her death is now celebrated annually by Theosophists as White Lotus Day long after her death starting in 1950.

But an Blavatsky is collected, writings were published. The full publication spanned 15 volumes and it came out over the course of 40 years.

Blavatsky is often credited with bringing Buddhism and Hinduism to the Western audience. And this is a little bit tricky to celebrate, of course, since these ideas were being channeled through a European lens. We also don't know really what the depth of her exposure was to these things before she started talking about them as though she were an expert. And since the study of these belief systems on the part of Blavatsky is difficult to corroborate in any level, particularly in her earlier years.

I just want people to recognize that that has to all be taken with a grain of salt.

We do have to note, though, that the Theosophical Society persists despite these bumpy times during Blavatsky life, her books continue to be pretty popular. Additionally, the Blavatsky Lodge in London is still there, although it has changed locations from where it was when Madame Blavatsky initially established it. And as for that damning report of 1885 that declared Madame Blavatsky a fraud in 1986, the Society for Psychical Research retracted it due to a review that found that Hodgson had set out to discredit Blavatsky and that his research and his methods were biased toward that.

Although there are a lot of the issues that Hodgson raised that remain unanswered. This is one of those things you'll sometimes find argued about on the Internet that some people will say this is vindication of Madame Blavatsky and others are like, no, no. They're just pointing out that the research was bad, not weighing in really on whether that conclusion would have been reached. Other rights, like I said, she continues to be very polarizing. I find her utterly fascinating, but I don't have a strong opinion.

I have some opinions, but they're not strong and they're kind of cloudy for me anyway, which is unusual just because there's always part of me that's like I don't know. I don't I don't know anything.

So do you have some listener mail for us? I do have a piece of listener mail. It's from our listener, Josie, who did the magic thing and sent us pictures of kitties.

But OK, lovely thing that ties in to the spooky season, as she calls it. She writes, Greetings, lovely people. It's getting close to spooky season. And that always reminds me of the very first episode of your podcast I heard, which was the Sodor family. History, I actually believe it was the first podcast I ever heard in my life, and I was so entrenched that I binged all your mystery episodes and then all of your other episodes, you guys are always my go to favorite podcasts.

And every October, I look back fondly on that feeling of excitement being swept up in your history mysteries. You guys do such a fantastic job, your graceful professional and always a delight. I appreciate you both so much. I was actually going to name my cats after you guys would, but she went with Nellie and Bessie instead because of their horse and cow like personalities respectively. My cat Bessie has Pytka and will eat metal. I remember one of you mentioning that cows eat metal.

Also, my love of Bessie Smith in your podcast has hosted quite a few adventurous Nellies. Hey, I had a cat that had picka. It's not fun. So my my hat is off to you because you have to manage it in crazy ways. That is why I stopped using pins when I said, oh, because I had a cat that would eat them or would try. He never successfully did because I always caught him. But that was stressful times she goes on.

Some of your podcasts have been so enchanting. I've listened to them multiple times, specifically the Fortia Indian school basketball team Theodosia Alston Bird. When I recently watched Hamilton, I was just waiting around for them to mention her. The Memphis sanitation strike. Katalina, the Lieutenant Nun, Halifax explosion, Maria Tallchief, the ballerina and so many more. My boyfriend loved the Klondike Big Land promotion episode, and I'm especially fond of your super ancient history episodes as well.

You cover such an array of topics and make them also interesting. Being a female carpenter, I always appreciate your episodes about female pioneers being Canadian. I'm always thrilled to see Canadian history episodes. I always love to hear more history about Canada and the Canadian American relationship and past wars and feuds and the indigenous people of this continent. You've taught me so much really valuable as Canadian schools don't teach us as much as they should. It's not just in Canada, by the way.

And now finally, my podcast suggestion, which is the Toronto Circus Riot of 1855. She goes on to tell us that before she was a carpenter, I used to fiddle around as an actor and performer and my old director, Angola, put on this show. She shares some information about it.

She also loves any history about Cicely because she's Sicilian, Canadian and always looking to reconnect to her roots and then she apologizes for it being long. Don't. It's delightful.

So that is Jocie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You see, those cats are cute. I don't even know what I would do with the information that someone had named a cat after me. So it's probably safest that you did not show up at your house.

Like, show me the kitty cat. Nobody want that. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at history podcast it I heart radio dotcom. You can also find us everywhere on social media as missed in history and you are welcome and encouraged to subscribe to the podcast. You can do that on the I Heart radio app at Apple podcasts or wherever it is you listen.

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