Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [24]
The Journey East
For all the heat it generated in the press, the early Theosophical Society was active only briefly during Blavatsky and Olcott’s few years together in America. By December 1878, the pair moved to India, uprooting the organization with them. Their mission to rescue the religions of the East from the Goliath of colonialism, Olcott and Blavatsky reasoned, would be best engaged on the soil from which those traditions sprang. For Blavatsky and Olcott, America had already served its purpose: It was a staging ground where the eccentric couple and their nascent following could formulate their ideas unmolested, except for the occasional gibe in the papers. Blavatsky even departed as an American citizen.
Once replanted in India, the story of Theosophy belonged less and less to America or to any nation. Olcott, Blavatsky, and their successors allied themselves with India’s independence movement and encouraged the spread of literacy in Hinduism’s holy texts, endearing themselves to countless Hindu worshippers. Starting in 1880, Olcott, often with a gouty leg and nothing but an oxcart to carry him over muddy roads, traveled throughout the nation of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He spoke in temples and open squares, where he urged youths and their families not to relinquish their Buddhist–monastic tradition and to argue against colonialist missionaries. An Anglican bishop groused in a letter home that “the Secretary of an obscure society” had been encouraging Buddhist monks, “hailing them as brothers in the march of intellect.” Olcott used the missionaries’ own methods against them: He wrote A Buddhist Catechism—still read in Sri Lankan classrooms today—to codify the native faith as missionaries had the Christian one. He successfully lobbied English authorities to permit the national celebration of Buddha’s birthday, during which worshippers rallied around an international Buddhist flag Olcott helped to design. He raised money for schools and educational programs. The Buddhist revival ignited. Within twenty years of Olcott’s first visit, the number of Buddhist schools in the island nation grew from four to more than two hundred.
Had any of his former friends in the law or newspaper business inquired as to what became of old Henry, they might have chortled over the spectacle of a retired military investigator with an eagle eye for fraud now traveling throughout the Orient with this Russian magician lady. But that would be far too shallow a reading of Olcott’s character. With Madame Blavatsky at his side—the two like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, each interchangeably occupying either role—the colonel understood himself to be on the mission of a lifetime. It was a mission whose influence touched Hindu and Buddhist cultures so deeply that Olcott may be the single most significant Western figure in the modern religious history of the East.
And if there were any hidden Mahatmas who had sent Blavatsky to America and then with Olcott to India, they might have had reason to be proud of their neophytes on other counts. Back in the United States and Europe, Blavatsky’s book Isis Unveiled popularized the word occultism and made the concept a matter of passionate interest among artists, authors, and spiritual seekers of the Western world—more than it had been any time since Renaissance scholars had marveled over the magical writings of Greek–Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus.
Transcendental Magic
The American public’s fascination with Blavatsky, and its ability to make any sense of her aims and background, was assisted by an earlier