She finally returned to Russia and to her husband, on the condition that she be required to spend only a minimal amount of time with him. She began holding seances in her grandfather’s home, quickly attracting a cross section of Russian intellectuals who were becoming increasingly intrigued by the paranormal, and by Madame Helena Blavatsky.
Her appeal obviously wasn’t limited to her skills as a clairvoyant, since over the next few years she was romantically involved with an Estonian spiritualist and a married opera singer while still living with her husband. She gave birth to a son, Yuri, who was deformed at birth, and none of her lovers claimed paternity. His death at the age of five devastated her and, she once wrote, destroyed her belief in the Russian Orthodox God. She held on to some of her faith, though, as evidenced in a subsequent statement that “there were moments when I believed deeply … that the blood of Christ had redeemed me.”
Money and clients for her occult pursuits were diminishing, so Helena decided to travel again, this time to Odessa, to Egypt, and to Paris, where she heard about the spiritualist movement that was gaining momentum in the United States. Sure that this was the new beginning she’d been searching for, she boarded a steamship for New York City, arriving in July of 1873 with little more than a dime to her name.
She struggled for more than a year, barely making ends meet with occasional séances and her job at a sweatshop. But then, in October of 1974, her life changed dramatically when she traveled to a remote farm in Vermont for the sole purpose of introducing herself to Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Colonel Olcott was writing a series of research articles on a pair of brothers who were conducting séances at the farm, and Helena decided he was someone she wanted and needed to meet.
She stayed at the farm for ten days, conducting séances with the Eddy brothers and making a very positive impression on Colonel Olcott. He wrote several articles about her and was delighted when she offered to translate them for publication in Russia. Thanks to those articles and word of mouth, Madame Helena Blavatsky’s fame began to spread throughout and beyond New York. Of far more significance, her relationship with Colonel Olcott blossomed into the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875, an organization that emphasizes cultural understanding between Eastern and Western philosophies, religions, and sciences and that continues to thrive today.
Adding more controversy to an already controversial life, she began claiming the appearance of a parade of manifested spirits during séances. An infamous photograph was taken of Madame Blavatsky seated in front of three of these manifested spirits, whom she called her Ascended Masters: her personal master, El Myora; Saint Germain, draped in an ermine cloak; and her teacher, Kuthumi, through whom she claimed to have channeled much of her written work, including The Secret Doctrine.
With or without the help of Ascended Master Kuthumi, Helena Blavatsky wrote The Secret Doctrine in 1888, and there’s no denying the accuracy of many of the prophecies recorded in that book. For example:
Between 1888 and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a death blow.
“Materialistic science” referred to scientists’ view at the time that the world was composed of nothing more than its material, visible, and tangible elements. That shortsighted view changed forever when, in 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays, exposing a whole new universe of realities beyond the naked eye, and, in 1896, when Antoine Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
The Secret Doctrine also included facts about the realities of energy that were contrary to the beliefs of the majority of scientists in the 1800s but came about after Helena Blavatsky committed them to paper in 1888. To name a few, she announced that:
- atoms could be Eleven years later, in 1897, Sir J. J. Thomson discovered the electron.
- atoms are perpetually in motion. Twelve years later, in 1900, Max Planck’s work laid the foundation for the quantum theory of physics.
- matter and energy can be converted. Seventeen years later, in 1905, Albert Einstein unveiled the theory of relativity.
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