“Women’s History Month Celebrates Female Cannabis Connoisseurs”

This was the headline posted by the magazine Cannabis Culture on March 1. The feature, listing, among others, H.P. Blavatsky, directs the reader to the site, Very Important Potheads, which has profiles of several female connoisseurs mentioned, including an entry on Blavatsky, which can be read here. The source for its information of her indulging is A.L. Rawson, “a close friend of Blavatsky for over forty years,” who wrote:

“She had tried hasheesh in Cairo with success, and she again indulged in it in this city under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith, who had had a large experience with the drug among his patients at Mount Lebanon, Syria. She said: ‘Hasheesh multiplies one’s life a thousandfold. My experiences are as real as if they were ordinary events of actual life. Ah! I have the explanation. It is a recollection of my former existences, my previous incarnations. It is a wonderful drug and it clears up profound mystery.’”

VIP comments: The modern day Theosophical Society denies hashish had any great influence on Blavatsky’s life, admitting she may have experimented with it in her youth, but that is about the extent of it. But a number of well known authors, such as Benjamin Walker and the much respected English writer Colin Wilson, thought her use of cannabis was relevant enough to have commented on it. The Theosophists point to a couple of negative comments towards hashish Blavatsky made near the end of her life when her health had deteriorated from chain-smoking cigarettes, and found herself unhappily surrounded by scandal. Many people have blamed a substance for their own personal downfall, and marijuana makes just as good a scapegoat as any. As many of us have experienced, few seem as self-righteous as the reformed addict. The Theosophists also challenge the legitimacy of A.L. Rawson, suggesting his claims are suspect. The fact is that A.L. Rawson was one of a few life-long friends Blavatsky had, and she herself attested to the validity of his character.

The “validity” of Rawson’s character has been the subject of a good piece of investigative journalism by John Patrick Deveney, “The Travels of H.P. Blavatsky and the Chronology of Albert Leighton Rawson: an unsatisfying investigation into H.P.B.’s whereabouts in the early 1850s,” published in the October 2004 issue of Theosophical History. Simply put: Rawson = suspect.

Who Was Fred S. Ellmore?

The blog, Me, Myself, and I, has an interesting sidelight on the identity of someone mentioned in Lucifer, September 1890. In the section, “Queries and Answers,” in that issue, Mme. Blavatsky was asked to comment on an account in the August 8, 1890, Chicago Tribune where Fred S. Ellmore, a young Chicagoan back from India, described some feats of legerdemain, including the Indian rope trick and the instantaneous growth of a mango tree, witnessed at Gaya. Even though the paper later revealed that the account was a fabrication by one of their writers, the story of the Indian rope trick took on a life of its own. As the blog points out:

Even H. P. Blavatsky was lured into it (September, 1890) never getting the “Fred S. Ellmore” punch line.
You see, Fred S. Ellmore was a pseudonym used by John Elbert Wilkie.
The inside joke being:
Fred S. Ellmore ==> Fred Sell More.

John Elbert Wilkie (1860–1934), an American journalist, later went on to head of the United States Secret Service from 1898 to 1911.

Blavatsky and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pt 2

Donald Lopez, Jr., begins his recent biography of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) with an anecdote about his exchange with a journalist who was planning a piece on the text: “he wondered whether I could answer a few questions. ‘Is The Tibetan Book of the Dead the most important work in Tibetan Buddhism?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Do all Tibetans own a copy?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have all Tibetans read it?’ ‘No.’ I said. ‘Is it a work that all Tibetans have heard of?’ ‘Probably not,’ I said.”

The chance encounter with the text in Darjeeling, India, by Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) at the beginning of the twentieth century was to make it the most recognizable of Tibetan works. A terma text, said to have been hidden by Padmasambhava in the eighth century and rediscovered by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth, the Bardo Thodol dealt with the transit through the bardo, or intermediate state, between death and rebirth.

It is not a text Blavatsky referred to (for someone who visited Tibet she mentions little of the major religious scriptures of the country, the exception being Tsong-kha-pha’s Lam Rim, an important instruction of the Geluk group), though the term bardo appears in one of the Mahatma letters from 1882.

Although Lopez implies that Evans-Wentz used the text as a means of Theosophical propaganda, not all Theosophists were welcoming of it. A letter from Basil Crump (an associate of Alice Cleather, one of Blavatsky’s personal pupils), written from Peking in 1928 and published later in The Canadian Theosophist of August 1942, warned that the book was not consistent with Blavatsky’s teachings. While in Darjeeling, Crump says: “We warned the Dr. to be careful about the Red Doctrine but he paid no attention and persisted in that line of study.”  The Bardo Thodol was a leading text of the Nyingma school, also known at the Red Caps, a term Blavatsky used for those who practiced black magic.

Parts of The Tibetan Book of the Dead are meant to be read to the dying individual: “Having read this, repeat it many times in the ear of the person dying, even before the expiration hath ceased, so as to impress it on the mind [of the dying one].” This is at variance with the instructions given by Blavatsky’s teachers:  “Speak in whispers, ye, who assist at a death-bed and find yourselves in the solemn presence of Death. Especially have you to keep quiet just after Death has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the busy work of the Past casting on its reflection upon the veil of the Future.”—“Memory in the Dying,” October 1889.

Yet, at the same time, Evans-Wentz spoke highly of Blavatsky. He cited some parts from her Voice of the Silence (Book of the Golden Precepts) in his later Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, and says: “The late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup was of opinion that, despite the adverse criticisms directed against H. P. Blavatsky’s works, there is adequate internal evidence in them of their author’s intimate acquaintance with the higher lamaistic teachings, into which she claimed to have been initiated.” It should be noted, however, that whatever she claimed to have learned in Tibet was of an esoteric nature, a term she consistently uses for oral teaching, outside the canonical scriptures.

Bibliography

Lopez, Donald S. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: a biography. Princeton University Press, 2011. 173 p.

Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford University Press, 2000. lxxxiv, 264 p.
Compiled and edited by Evans-Wentz, with new Foreword and Afterword by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Karma Lingpa. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Viking/Penguin, 2006. xlix, 535 p.
The largest selection of texts available in English, translated by Gyurme Dorje.

Cuevas, Brian J. The hidden history of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford University Press, 2003. 328 p. 

Blavatsky and The Tibetan Book of the Dead

When W. Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead was published in 1927 it was regarded as a work of scholarship, Donald Lopez Jr.’s new book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: a biography, just out from Princeton University Press, indicates that it may no longer be so viewed by academics. The book’s main crime seems to be that it has become too popular, remaining in print.

Evans-Wentz was a member of the Point Loma Theosophical Society, and his text was interpreted through the eyes of a Theosophist. This gives Lopez the opportunity to take a look at Mme. Blavatsky and dismiss her. But along the way furthers a few myths of his own.

“Ancient Egypt and its mysteries had been particularly important to Madame Blavatsky; her first major work was entitled Isis Unveiled.” But the title was the publisher's. And anyone who has read the book knows that, in her view, Egypt was settled by colonizers from ancient India.

“In 1894, she published in Lucifer a letter she had received from one of the mahatmas…” But, as she had died in 1891, this must have been a phenomenon in itself.

He quotes from the Society for Psychical Research Committee’s investigation on Theosophy as if it was the last word on the subject, with no indication that its credibility has slowly been eroding over the past century.

Spiritualism and Theosophy seem to be convertible terms for him, for he writes: “If we were to trace the lineage of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it would not be Walter Evans-Wentz back to Kazi Dawa Samdup to Karma Lingpa to Padmasambhava. It would be Walter Evans-Wentz to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to Colonel Olcott to the Fox sisters.”

Readers of Blavatsky News will be surprised to hear that “Madame Blavatsky, who inspired many of the greatest poets and painters of the turn of the century, is but vaguely remembered a century later.” Perhaps this may be the view from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Lopez teaches at the University of Michigan, but, as our coverage over the past year has shown, it is hardly the case in the outside world.

Lopez may have already provided an evaluation of his critique when he wrote in the Foreword to the Oxford University Press edition of Evans-Wentz’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 2000: “anything that a scholar might add today will only serve as material for a scholar some fifty years from now, who will demonstrate the biases and misunderstandings of a preface written fifty years ago, a preface that merely offers evidence of the fin de siècle zeitgeist of those who once called themselves postmoderns.” One may not have to wait that long.

Major Figures in Philosophical Theology

Courses referencing Helena Petrovna Blavatsky at the university level have been slow coming in the U.S.A. Other than those offered over the years by Prof. James Santucci at Cal State in Fullerton, California, they have been few and far between. So the following course listing offered this year at Drew University in New Jersey was particularly surprising:

HEPH 391 | Major Figures in Philosophical Theology
A seminar focusing on one major figure from the Western or Eastern traditions. Examples include, but are not limited to, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, Helena Blavatsky, Sri Aurobindo, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William James. Signature of instructor required for registration.

This is even more unusual considering that Drew University is a Theological School “rooted in the Wesleyan heritage and celebrates the centrality of Christ to our faith. The school does not require students to adopt a particular position or creed, but expects that students will remain in touch with and develop their own distinct faith tradition. Students take responsibility for articulating their own convictions, yet remain in dialogue with those of other faiths and with Christians who may think and believe differently. Students find many persons who share their faith experience and learn from persons who challenge them with their differences. In a world where diversity is often an excuse for hatred and a trigger for violence, Drew students learn to use diversity as a key to unlock the mysteries of a God beyond individual understanding, who is revealed more fully through our shared faith and experience.”

Alexander Wilder on Blavatsky

Marc Demarest, who maintains the online Emma Hardinge Britten Archive, where one can find all things pertinent to the British medium Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), posts a link on his blog, Chasing Down Emma, to a piece by Alexander Wilder in the April 1907 Metaphysical Magazine eulogizing the late Henry Steel Olcott. While it is a memorial to Col. Olcott, Wilder also gives his impressions of Blavatsky:

At his [Olcott's] pressing invitation, I visited Col. Olcott’s abode on [West] 47th street. There he introduced me to Madame Blavatsky….Mme. Blavatsky was portly, large-chested, broad of abdomen—in short, what I conceive to be a Tartar figure. Her hair was golden like that of the goddess Aphrodite, her head large, the brow full, and other features well filled out. She knew well how to adapt her conversation to every one’s humour, but she did not scruple to denounce, or to speak contemptuously to individuals.

Parts of Wilder’s appreciation appear in his “How Isis Unveiled was written” published a in the New York theosophical journal, The Word, of May 1908. Compare what he wrote above with his description a year later:

She did not resemble in manner or figure what I had been led to expect. She was tall, but not strapping; her countenance bore the marks and exhibited the characteristics of one who had seen much, thought much, traveled much, and experienced much. Her figure reminded me of the description which Hippokrates has given to the Scyths, the race from which she probably descended….Her appearance was certainly impressive, but in no respect was she coarse, awkward, or ill-bred. On the other hand she exhibited culture, familiarity with the manners of the most courtly society and genuine courtesy itself. She expressed her opinions with boldness and decision, but not obtrusively. It was easy to perceive that she had not been kept within the circumscribed limitations of a common female education; she knew a vast variety of topics and could discourse freely upon them.

Wilder’s “Henry Steel Olcott” on pp. 371-77 of The Metaphysical Magazine for April 1907 is a good period piece, conveying something of the time by an eyewitness to the events, and, thanks to Marc Demarest, can be read here.

Alexander Wilder (1823-1908), whose editing shaped Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled, remains an unrecognized influence as one of the sources for the modern American esoteric revival. Mark R. Jaqua gives about all that is known of him in his introduction to his collection of Wilder’s magazine output, The Later Platonists, which can be accessed here.

Leander Edmund Whipple was editor of The Metaphysical Magazine at the time, which led us to wonder if he might be any relation to Edward Whipple, author of that monument to industry from 1901, A Biography of James M. Peebles, M.D., A.M.?

February 17

The Sri Lankan Daily News reports that there is a move in Colombo for “the old building where Col. Olcott lived and used as the old Ananda College and the building where the Buddhist schools were administered to declare them a National Heritage by National Heritage Minister Dr Jagath Balasuriya.” February 17, the date of Olcott’s passing, is still a day of remembrance in Sri Lanka, and the paper features a piece by S P Weerasekara “Col Henry Steel Olcott: Great name in Buddhist history,” in today’s edition, giving some background on his accomplishments.

With a sense of pride and utmost we have to point out to the country at large that as a result of pursuing the thinking of Col Olcott, Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society was able to establish 460 Buddhist schools, including leading colleges, such as Ananda, Nalanda, Dharmapala, Dharmaraja, Visakha, and Musaeus College. Amidst various adversities, difficulties, obstacles great men like Col Olcott who directed our nation in the proper direction towards advancement, during a stage when Sinhala Buddhists had forgotten their good culture and traditions, it is our duty to commemorate them with a sense of deep gratitude. The younger generation in particular must be knowledgeable about the excellent qualities of this great leader, about his life and history and follow his path leading to advancement of our country. We have to record our highest gratitude to Madam Helena Blavatsky who assisted him in all his endeavours.

The rest of the article can be read here.