The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [46]
Madame Blavatsky promised her followers a world of reincarnation, of balance with universe, and even—with time—of mystic abilities of their own. She had begun her Theosophical Society in New York, publishing a book of her philosophy called Isis Unveiled in 1877, but then moved her headquarters to Madras, India, to be “closer to the source” of her powers. She still spent much of her time in the United States and Europe, spreading her particular gospel. In the summer of 1884, she had attended an SPR dinner in Cambridge, where she charmed the company, despite her “unattractive appearance,” Sidgwick noted. “She is a genuine being, with a vigorous nature both intellectual and emotional, and a real desire for the good of mankind,” he wrote in his diary. He was impressed by her direct way of looking at people, and the down-to-earth cattiness of her conversation: “Thus in the midst of an account of the Mahatmas in Tibet, intended to give us an elevated view of these personages, she blurted out her candid impression that the chief Mahatma of all was the most utter dried up mummy that she ever saw.”
Even Nora liked Blavatsky’s direct manners. Further, the notion of astral projection was a fascinating one, and one that the society was eager to test. But—as happened so often with high-visibility psychics—Madame Blavatsky deftly avoided being tested. She explained that the source of her powers now lay in India. She’d built an elaborately gilded shrine in Madras, glittering with carved vines and blossoms, angels and animals, containing tiny drawers into which spirit letters would suddenly appear. It was unfortunate, she said, that the investigators couldn’t work with her there.
Thus Richard Hodgson found himself in Bombay, admiring the shimmer of the fireflies from a hotel room paid for by Henry and Nora Sidgwick, and organizing a trip to the famous shrine of Madame Blavatsky.
“THE EVIDENCE PUBLISHED by the English society is of a nature not to be ignored by scientific men.” So read the first circular of the American Society for Psychical Research, which was officially founded in early 1885, excited into being by William Barrett, three years after the creation of the British SPR. The American group, however, decided against being led by classical scholars, as the British society was. Its founding members, among them William James, determined to operate on purely scientific methods, to use only trained researchers as investigators. “Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all truth than others,” James explained, but even he thought researchers tended to be more believable as experts. Scientists were better trained to gather evidence, “and what we want is not only truth, but evidence.” There was a risk that the researchers’ reputations might be tarnished by association with the occult—one had only to observe the effect on him, or Crookes, or Wallace—but, James noted, “how much easier to discredit literary men or clergymen!”
The ASPR remained open, of course, to members from other disciplines, and they had a respectable few, among them James’s publisher, Henry Holt (still impatiently waiting for the book on psychology); Gardiner Hubbard, who would soon found his own organization, the National Geographic Society; the Asian scholar Crawford Toy, who had been expelled from Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville for his efforts to reinterpret the Old Testament in the light of Darwinian science; Charles