Free Spirit

By John Skow

MADAME BLAVATSKY, THE WOMAN BEHIND THE MYTH by Marion Meade Putnam; 528 pages; $19.95

She claimed, falsely, to have been wounded while fighting in Garibaldi's army, to have crossed the Rocky Mountains in a covered wagon and to have learned ancient mysteries in a Tibetan lamasery. She knew how to charm snakes and people, roll cigarettes, and swear fluently in several languages. She learned horsemanship from Kalmuck tribesmen and was a superb rough-and-tumble rider. The granddaughter of a Russian princess, she cared nothing for Victorian morality, but insisted, after two marriages, several lovers and the birth of an illegitimate child, that she was still a virgin.

Between what is almost certainly true about Madame H.P. (for Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky and what is almost certainly false, there is a perilous region of mists and myths. The dominant truth about H.P.B. was that she founded and was chief illusionist for the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist sect that influenced the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the thinking of Jawaharlal Nehru, and helped to revive the consciousness of India.

On the more important question of Madame Blavatsky's occult powers, Biographer Meade takes a view that will seem evenhanded to most readers who are not Theosophists (the society persists throughout the world, including New York City, where it was founded, Lon don, where Blavatsky had her wildest suc cess, and Adyar, a suburb of Madras, where she set up her headquarters). The Victorian age had a great hankering for table rapping, poltergeists, spirit writing and spooks of all sorts. H.P.B. was a fair ly good parlor conjurer (she learned some of her tricks from a Coptic magician in Cairo), and she was quite unashamed about the use of confederates and apparatus. She specialized, rather charmingly, in the invisible mending of broken crock ery and in small gifts and chatty letters from a society of superhuman Masters who dwelt in Tibet. She was a gifted hyp notist of herself and others. When pressed, and if the lights were dim, she could pro duce spectral figures.

Her motive was not fraud of the financial kind; she supported herself and some times the Theosophical Society by prodigious feats of freelance journalism, mostly for Russian newspapers. She did have a powerful need for self-dramatization, however, and a real belief in the spirit-infested cosmology she described in two long, marvelously jumbled works of Ori ental philosophy, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Her Tibetan Masters dictated these volumes to her, she seems to have been convinced, although their San skrit quotations tended to be shaky. If a bit of spiritualist theater in a darkened room helped to shore up the convictions of her fellow Theosophists, where was the harm? It was charlatanism in the highest cause of all, she felt, and thus when one of her stunts went wrong, or when a dis gruntled confederate published letters from her, giving detailed instructions for illusions, H.P.B. was unembarrassed.

Author Meade believes that even if Blavatsky herself was flawed, she did have a vision -- though it may have been ornamented by the hashish she smoked and the Oriental lore she claimed to have received from mysterious sources. She was living in India among Indians and praising their culture and religious ideas at a time when English mem-sahibs liked to boast of never having touched the hand of a native.

As Meade describes Blavatsky, she was a gallant figure, cheerfully aware of skidding toward disaster, always ready with a bizarre scheme to rescue herself and her bemused followers. Toward the end, in the 1880s, matters seemed hope less. She was living in exile in Germany, fat, sick, impoverished, deserted by the faithful and under attack for fakery by the Society for Psychical Research. The reader feels like cheering when she turns up a few months later in London, outrageous as ever, leaking cosmological eye wash with every wheeze, as the head of a large and adoring band of occultists.

There, in 1891, having made a convert of the formidable feminist orator Annie Besant, who was to carry the Theosophists into the 20th century, she died in some thing like triumph.

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