Let some call me a medium and a spiritualist, others an impostor
When I am dead and gone people will, perhaps, appreciate my disinterested motives
“Death is neither to be feared nor envied,” Helena Blavatsky wrote in 1888. “The ‘dead’ are neither greater nor less than those of us who are now alive. The dead will live again and we shall die again always the same real persons which we make ourselves, yet always expressing different parts of our natures in different states and conditions of consciousness. “
Roughly three years after penning What is Death, the Russian author was herself gone from influenza, having contracted the virus during a winter epidemic while living in the U.K. Her death, predictably, caused a further rift among the leaders of the Theosophical movement she founded in New York City some 16 years prior.
The philosophy – one Blavatsky insisted was not a religion – was already suffering an ongoing power struggle. On returning to London to discover the Society’s London Lodge embattled, she opened her own rival Blavatsky Lodge, in a successful bid to siphon followers from spiritualist, Alfred Percy Sinnett, under whose leadership, she warned the movement would become “covered over with moss and slime.”
Following her death, The Philadelphia Times published a statement noting that one Henry R. Foulke (about whom little information appears available at present) had been her handpicked successor, earning the respect of “higher spiritual intelligences and forces.” The news was quickly refuted by a pair of Blavatsky’s allies. In a letter printed in The New York Times, one referred to Foulke as a “madman,” adding that his assertions were, “wholly and deliberately false.”
The words of Constance Georgina Louise Wachtmeister were even harsher, reporting,
We treated Mr. Henry B. Foulke as a lunatic who self-conceit and vanity overtopped his reason. In the plainest terms we told him that we declined his proposition, and I thought the whole matter had ended, but, seeing your journal that his self-delusion is still so great that he persists in making the most absurd statements about himself, Mme. Blavatsky, myself, and my coworkers, I beg most emphatically to state that Mr. H.B. Foulke’s assertions are falsehoods and his pretensions humbug.
The struggle was understandable, vying for spiritual control over a movement that would boast some 45,000 followers across 14 countries at its height. In its earliest years, Blavastky served as its driving force, a seemingly bottomless reserve of intelligence and will. The mysterious figure arrived at the height of global spiritualism, borrowing heavily from Buddhism and Hinduism to deliver a promised “synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy.”
Claiming to have studied with spiritual masters in Tibet, Blavatsky offered the west a previously unseen glimpse into the world of eastern thought. The foundation of her theosophical principles were not a debunking of spiritualism, exactly, so much a suggestion that the living was unable to fully appreciate the nature of the dead. While, she stated, it was true that mediums could communicate with spirits, the knocking sounds they produced were actually the product of “shells” – a kind of spiritual residue left behind on Earth.
“When I am dead and gone people will, perhaps, appreciate my disinterested motives,” Blavatsky told a friend. “I have pledged my word to help people on to Truth while living, and I will keep my word. Let them abuse and revile me; let some call me a medium and a Spiritualist, others an impostor. The day will come when posterity will learn to know me better.”
Even as her movement amassed a large following, Blavatsky question the nature of those who carried the banner. “There are about half a dozen real theosophists in the world,” she told a young, theosophy-curious poet named William Butler Yeats. “And one of those is stupid.”
Sources:
Foulke Said to Be a Lunatic https://www.nytimes.com/1892/11/26/archives/foulke-said-to-be-a-lunatic-the-theosophists-deny-that-he-is.html
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality by Gary Lachman
Secret Doctrines https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/11/14/secret-doctrines/
Spiritualism, Science, and the Mysterious Madame Blavatsky https://daily.jstor.org/spiritualism-science-and-the-mysterious-madame-blavatsky/