Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [23]
The young Edison told Olcott about an elaborate instrument he had constructed—with one end attached to his forehead and the other to a pendulum—to test the kinetic powers of the mind. By 1920, Edison told a reporter that he had “been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” If Edison ever completed the device, it was not unveiled to the public. The baseball popularizer and Civil War commander Doubleday discoursed among his new acquaintances about karma, which he said had given him courage under fire. Doubleday also began producing the first English translation of French magician Éliphas Lévi’s nineteenth-century occult classic Ritual and Dogma of High Magic, better known as Transcendental Magic.
To Olcott’s family and friends, the whole arrangement would have been bizarre enough if Henry’s new roommate was merely one of the sundry mediums he had taken to writing about. But this was odder still. His lady cohabitant—with whom he grew passionately close but never shared a bed—was the rotund, hypnotic-eyed Russian officer’s daughter named Helena Petrovna, or, as she would become famously known in fin de siècle culture, Madame Blavatsky: a magic-making, myth-weaving high priestess of the occult. After years of far-off travel, the eccentric, chain-smoking noblewoman had reached American shores in 1873, shortly before she and Olcott met at the Eddy farmhouse. Many said she could conjure up mediumistic or psychical phenomena at will—such as the ringing of invisible bells, the appearance of magical paintings, or the bump-in-the-night mischief of poltergeistlike “elemental spirits.” On a typical day at the Lamasery, Blavatsky materialized—or, in Olcott’s lexicon, “phenomenally produced”—a set of phantom sugar tongs when no pair could be found for the couple’s after-dinner coffee.
But this was child’s play. Blavatsky said she was dispatched to America by a secret order of religious masters—“Mahatmas,” or the “Great White Brothers,” she would later call them. (She didn’t mean white in any racial sense but in a sense of inner purity.) Her mission was to expose the limits and fallacies of Spiritualism and point the way to higher truths. While she admired the cosmic visions of Andrew Jackson Davis, Blavatsky hinted at secret teachings that the Poughkeepsie Seer and the trance mediums who trailed after him could only begin to guess.
Soon after they met, Olcott began to receive peculiar gold-inked letters from some of Blavatsky’s Eastern Masters, or Mahatmas, signed with pyramidlike cryptograms or the name Tuitit Bey, Observatory of Luxor. Olcott later claimed that one of the turbaned masters materialized before him in their West Side apartment. Addressing Olcott as “Brother Neophyte,” one of the Mahatma letters directed him to stay at Blavatsky’s side and “not let one day pass away without seeing her.” He listened—and the two worked together days into nights. They collaborated on Blavatsky’s epic-in-the-making, Isis Unveiled—a dense, sprawling, and ultimately extraordinary panoply of occult subjects. Blavatsky told of a hidden doctrine that united all the world’s ancient religions and cosmic laws but that was unknown to materialist science and modern religion. Most fatefully, she and Olcott transformed their salon of fellow seekers into a nascent organization dedicated to rediscovering theosophia, or “divine wisdom.” It was called the Theosophical Society. It was not a religion itself but rather aimed to plumb the inner depths of religion, to promote religious universality, and—in a goal that would become increasingly important as time passed