In the 1970s I lived for a time in a second floor apartment in a building that also served as the headquarters for the West Chester, Pennsylvania, Theosophical Society.  

In a deal with the landlord to lower the rent, I cleaned and swept the offices of the Theosophical Society rooms. These rooms were decorated with Victorian-era sofas, various sized mahogany and walnut tables and different sized lecterns. The windows were outfitted in thick drapery. The Oriental rugs were bright and colorful, the lamps oddly Victorian with heavily tasseled lampshades. There was a small library and numerous figurines — a Buddha, an Indian deity with eight arms, and miniaturized Far Eastern building replicas. 

The rooms were rarely dirty but I vacuumed the floors anyway and dusted the large portraits of Madame Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, the founders of the Theosophical Society, that hung over the fireplace in the main room.  

While cleaning the rooms I’d often put my dust pan and brush aside while cleaning and study the large portrait of Madame Blavatsky. Sometimes I sat before the portrait as if waiting for a revelation although Madame never reached out at me, never spoke, never caused one of the doors to slam shut. Nothing happened — there were no invisible rays that came from the portrait, unlike the crucifix that came to life in front of Saint Francis of Assisi as he prayed in his monastery’s chapel. 

It was a psychic dead zone. 

Theosophy’s emphasis on the “living” existence of spirits did not frighten me. Dangerously ill as a child with double pneumonia, one day I thought I discerned an image of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux emerging from the white wall in front of my sickbed. The shadowy figure never quite “came off” but it hovered in the paint as a suggestion, an idea that something might be emerging. Or that something could.

Stories of spirit manifestations in my family were not uncommon. For years my great aunt spoke of waking up one morning and seeing her deceased brother John, dressed in white, seated in the rocking chair near her bed. She said she could clearly see her brother — in full physical form — for a couple of minutes before the vision disappeared. 

Years ago, while working as a reporter for a local newspaper, I had an assignment to interview the owner of an Atlantic City bed and breakfast, a project that required me to stay overnight. That evening I dreamt that a traditionally robed Catholic nun was hugging me in the most beneficent way. The dream was powerful, so much so that I told my press companion the next morning that a “nun had visited me in my sleep and squeezed me into her wimple.”  Later, during a tour of the house with the owner, I noticed a small glass stained window by a stairway landing and asked the proprietor about its origins.

He told me that in the 1920s and ‘30s the house was a convent. The nun in the dream suddenly made sense. 

The first Theosophical Society was founded in New York by Blavatsky and Olcott. Olcott met Blavatsky in 1874. Blavatsky was already famous as a clairvoyant. The pair met in Vermont where Olcott, an attorney-turned-journalist, had gone to investigate the Eddy Brothers, both self-proclaimed clairvoyants and mediums. Olcott was at that point a diehard skeptic. Olcott’s search for empirical evidence probably had its roots in his position as the head of the commission which investigated the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. With his mutton-chop whiskers and pince-nez spectacles, he took to Blavatsky. Blavatsky took him under her wing and became his teacher. Olcott became a firm believer and together with Blavatsky worked to gather and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe.

Blavatsky believed that “The whole universe is filled with spirits,” and that there was “a latent spirit in all matter.” 

This is something my great aunt always maintained — the one who had a vision of her brother John, who was a medical student at Penn before he had to drop out because of his epilepsy.  

“Spirits do not communicate through healthy persons,” Blavatsky wrote. “Spirits are forever seeking a body to inhabit, seize on those which are defective, being unable to control those which are not. In the East, insane persons are regarded with peculiar veneration, as being possessed by spirits.”    

A reporter asked Blavatsky if being possessed by spirits meant being possessed by the devil. 

“No,” she answered. “Daimon is the word in Scripture and it doesn’t necessarily mean a devil. It may mean a god. Socrates had a Daimon, and he certainly was not possessed by a devil.”

Madame Blavatsky would retreat to India with Olcott (Olcott would later separate from Blavatsky and branch out on his own) to establish the headquarters for the first Theosophical Society. Before she moved to India she moved to Philadelphia in November 1874.

“The more respectable members of her society spent much of their time apologizing for her behavior,” wrote Joy Dixon in Divine Feminine, Theosophy and Feminism in England. 

“Her outspokenness, her vulgarity, and her refusal to abide by the niceties of drawing-room etiquette…. Some wondered audibly why the new revelation had not been conveyed through someone rather more genteel, to which Blavatsky responded, ‘I do not care about public opinion.’”  

The Philadelphia headquarters of the United Lodge of Theosophists, at 1917 Walnut Street, has been in operation since 1945. The United Lodge of Theosophists was founded in 1909 by Robert Crosbie (1849-1919) as an offshoot of the Theosophical Society mainly to preserve the writings of William Q. Judge, an Irishman born in Dublin. Judge’s most famous book, The Ocean of Theosophy, was published in 1893.  

Theosophy gave birth to a number of schisms and different brands of the movement. Judge, for instance, believed that Olcott and Annie Besant (who rose to prominence after Blavatsky’s death in 1891) deviated from the original teachings of Blavatsky’s Mahatmas (or teachers). Olcott and Besant’s organization — Theosophical Society-Adyar is based in India while Judge’s organization, the Theosophical Society, is based in Pasadena, California. 

Another schism occurred when Ernest Temple Hargrave formed the Theosophical Society in America. Other schisms arose, namely the Temple of the People, which broke from Hargrave’s branch, and The United Lodge of Theosophists (ULT) formed in 1909.  

Critics of Theosophy often cited the dangers of theosophists joining the “ranks of faddists and cranks.” Others criticized the unconventional dress of serious theosophists. George Orwell presented his idea as to how to dispel “the smell of ‘crankishness’”

“If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler, and creeping ‘Jesus’ sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!”            

Madame Blavasky almost surely had ambivalent feelings about living in Philadelphia because in 1894, she wrote: “America is the best and the worst, the kindest and most abusive country in the world.” 

In her later years, Blavasky often referred to herself as “an old hippopotamus.” She liked to dress in loose flowing garments with an Indian cut. She called the spirits she communicated with “brothers.” In her daily life, friends pointed out that she exhibited no traces of asceticism. At her citizenship naturalization ceremony in 1878, she described herself as a Buddhist. When she lived in New York City at 46 Irving Place she was known as “the famous heathen of Eighth Avenue.” On leaving New York City for India in December of 1878, she remarked, “I shall go to Bombay, and be with my dear heathen who are free from the yoke of Christianity at least.” 

Many people wanted to know what she thought about Jesus Christ. One woman asked her about Christ’s “nature” and Blavasky answered, “Madame, I have not the honor of the gentleman’s acquaintance.”  

(Well, as they say—that was rude.) 

Born into an aristocratic Russian family, sometimes when she went into a trance she held a small Russian three-bar cross — reminiscent, perhaps, of the Russian mystic Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. 

Some called her “a great Russian bear,” and “a smart woman but ignorant of all the graces and amenities of life.” She was described as “generous appearing” and brusque. A chronic chain smoker, she often had cigarette papers in one pocket and tobacco stuffed in another. One observer wrote: “The cigarettes were countless and the flowerpots were full of stubs.” She is said to have smoked 200 cigarettes a day.

Many marveled at her intensity.

“Never have I seen such an intense creature, intense in purpose, intense in her endeavor,” a friend of hers once commented. 

When she was writing her first book, Isis Unveiled, she wrote 25 pages per day.  Often she would write in bed from nine in the morning until two the following morning. She could sit at the piano and improvise with great skill. She also claimed that the raps that people heard on her walls were produced by her own willpower, not spirits.  

Her willpower was noteworthy. A visitor to her New York home noted that “she caused a great table to rise up in the air without touching it.” There are hundreds of other incidents of how she made things appear and disappear. Colonel Olcott even claimed to have learned how to cure people of serious diseases.      

Philadelphia attracted many mediums in 1874. According to John Vidumsky, author of a Hidden City retrospective of Blavatsky’s life in Philadelphia, there were about 300 mediums in the city at that time. 

Two mediums, Nelson and Jennie Holmes, had unleashed a scandal that threatened the whole profession. Six months earlier, they had begun holding commercial séances at 50 N. 9th St, where “spirits” would appear in a large cabinet, showing just their faces or hands. These particular spirits called themselves John King and Katie King….. It was then that Blavatsky came to Philadelphia to investigate.

Blavatsky knew that the Holmeses were charlatans but defended them anyway because she knew that the public would view all of Spiritualism as fraudulent if she didn’t speak out.   

Philadelphia did one thing for Blavatsky: it provided her with a husband. 

Not that she needed a husband, of course. The steely Russian bear could handle most things on her own although she did manage to attract the romantic attention of a certain Michael C. Betanelly. Betanelly pursued Blavasky with the relentlessness of a stalker and finally got Blavasky to consent to a walk down the aisle. The two were married in the First Unitarian Church on April 3, 1875 with the Rev. William H. Furness. The couple moved into what would later become the White Dog Café at 3420 Sansom Street.

The unhappy marriage lasted just several months. A divorce was granted in 1878. 

Philadelphia had taught Madame Helena Petrovna Blavasky two things:  She needed to come up with her own branch of Spiritualism, and she needed a life mate about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.   

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.