Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky in India 1879-1883

HPB and H. S. Olcott (center) in Bombay 1881

 

As Theosophical Society President Henry Steele Olcott wrote in the second volume of Old Diary Leaves (1900) about his first year in India accompanied by Society Co-Founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky:
 

 . . . every scene and experience had the charm of novelty, and we enjoyed them like children.  It was something, after all, to be suddenly transferred from prosaic America and its atmosphere of mad haste and bitter commercial competition, to the calm and mental peace of hoary India, where the sage had first place in public estimation and the saint was exalted above all princes.  Scarcely any head would have been unaffected by the intoxication of the popular love and seeming reverence that we received, the delightful discussions of philosophy and spiritual ideals, the contact with high-thinkers and noted scholars, the ever-changing, picturesque daily incidents of our wanderings.  I, who had passed through the social hurricane called the war of the Rebellion, and the tumult of a long public service, was moved to a degree I can now, with my present knowledge of Pandits and their ways, hardly realize, by a meeting of the Literary Society of Benares Pandits, convened on 21st December in my honor.

 
Olcott and HPB strived to increase public interest in the Theosophical Society throughout India with Olcott delivering numerous lectures with crowds sometimes numbering in the thousands while HPB concentrated on preparing articles for the monthly The Theosophist journal.
 
In May 1880, Olcott and HPB found themselves formally acknowledged as Buddhists at a temple ceremony in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  “We had previously declared ourselves Buddhists long before, in America, both privately and publicly, so that this was but a formal confirmation of our previous professions . . . H. P. B. was as completely accepted a Buddhist as any Sinhalse in the Island . . . Our Buddhism was, in a word, a philosophy, not a creed.”
 
Their metaphysical awareness encompassed numerological observations.  After the sea passage from Galle to Colombo on their way to Tuticorin, Olcott noticed: “Our fateful number seven asserted itself as usual: our visitors numbering seven, the last boat to come off (bringing us a copy of the latest issue of the Theosophist) bearing that number, and our engines being started at 7.7 p.m.” 
 
Their relationship with Mr. A. P. Sinnett began with a “brisk correspondence” ensuing after Olcott received a letter from him soon after their arrival in Bombay.
 

. . . as Editor of the Pioneer, he expresses to me the desire of becoming acquainted with H. P. B. and myself, in case we should be coming up country, and his willingness to publish any interesting facts about our mission to India.  In common with the whole Indian press, the Pioneer had noted our arrival.  Mr. Sinnett writes that, from having had a number of chances in London to investigate certain remarkable mediumistic phenomena, he felt more interest than the average journalist in occult questions.


Not another Anglo-Indian Editor was disposed to be kind to us, or to be just in his discussion of our views and ideals.  Mr. Sinnett alone was our true friend and conscientious critic; but he was a powerful ally, since he controlled the most influential newspaper in India, and more than any other journalist possessed the confidence and respect of the chief officers of Government.

 
A six-week visit with the Sinnetts at Simla was a period of many remarkable occurrences.  Instances described by Olcott were also recounted by Sinnett in his nonfiction The Occult World first published in 1881.  Olcott afforded a candid glimpse of HPB’s “savage temper” during this period.
 

News from Bombay about the turn the Bates affair was taking threw her into a paroxysm of excitement, and the next morning, as usual, she made me the scapegoat; stamping up and down the room and making it appear that I was the proximate cause of all her trials and tribulations.  My notes say that Sinnett privately expressed to me his feeling of despair to see that she would not control herself, but threw away all her chances to make friends among the class whose goodwill it was most important to secure.  The English, he said, always associate true merit with calm self-control.

 
The Phenomena in Simla included the recurrent “table-rapping and fairy-bell ringing.”  There was also “a queer phenomenon for a gentleman visitor: she rubbed off from the chintz cover of the chair in which she was sitting a duplicate of one of the flowers in the pattern.  The flower was not a phantasm, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, but a substantial object, as though a piece of the cloth corresponding with the outline of the flower had been removed from the chintz under her hands; the chintz, however, was unmutilated.”
 
Offering a "narrative exactly as I find it told in my Diary entry . . .," Olcott provided his eyewitness account of the “much-mooted incident” at a picnic where a needed seventh cup and saucer were dug up from the ground at the spot indicated by HPB; along with his remembrance of what Sinnett called the “brooch incident” in The Occult World, among other unexpected occurrences.  When HPB was present at a social event, there would sometimes ensue what Olcott referred to as “this phenomena-hunting business."  There were occasional incidents involving ‘precipitation’ (materialization) such as in June 1882 during a visit to Baroda (Vadodara)—“the flourishing capital of H. H. The Gaikwar” (ruler)—when HPB was with Judge Gadgil and his friend Mr. Kirtane.  Instances of these phenomena had also been described in the first volume of Old Diary Leaves (1895), including HPB’s New York precipitations of portraits of ‘the Yogi’ and M. A. Oxon (pen name of William Stainton Moses).
 

I had been out to see the Gaikwar, and on my return found Kirtane and Gadgil standing at the threshold of H. P. B.’s open door, while she was in the middle of the room with her back towards us.  Our two friends told me not to step inside, as Madame B. Was doing a phenomenon and had just turned them out on the verandah where I found them.  The next minute she came towards us, and, taking a sheet of paper from the table, told the gentlemen to mark it for identification.  Receiving it back, she said: “Now turn me in the direction of his residence.”  They did so.  She then laid the paper between her palms (held horizontally), remained quiet a moment, then held it towards us and went and sat down.  Cries of amazement broke out from the two Durbaris on seeing on the just before clean sheet of paper, a letter addressed to me in the handwriting and bearing the signature of the then British Resident at that Court.  It was a most peculiar, small caligraphy, and the signature more like a tiny tangle of twine than a man’s name.  They then told me their story.  It seems that they were asking H. P. B. to explain the scientific rationale of the process of precipitating upon paper, cloth, or any other surface, a picture or writing, then invisible to the onlooker, and without the help of ink, paints, pencils, or other mechanical agents.


They urgently begged her to do the thing for them.  “Well, then,” she finally said, “tell me the name of some man or woman most unfriendly to the Theosophical Society, one whom neither Olcott nor I could have ever known.”  At once, they mentioned Mr. . . . the British Resident, who held us and our Society in especial hatred, who never missed the chance of saying unkind things of us, and who had prevented the Gaikwar from inviting H. P. B. and myself to his enthronement, as he had otherwise intended, on the suggestion of Judge Gadgil.

I thought they would explode with laughter when they read the contents of the note.  It was addressed to “My dear Colonel Olcott,” begged my pardon for the malicious things he had said against us, asked me to enter him as a subscriber to our “world renowned magazine, the Theosophist,” and said he wished to become a member of the Theosophical Society: it was signed “Yours sincerely” and with his name.

 
On the previous occasion of the aforementioned picnic, Olcott had observed the “wonder” of a gentleman’s precipitated Theosophical Society diploma of membership along with an official letter "signed 'Faithfully yours . . . (the name in Tibetan characters) for H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society.'"
 
Reading the second volume of the six-book history of the Theosophical Society Old Diary Leaves by Henry Steel Olcott, I was reminded that manifestations of so-called ‘paranormal’ or unexplained phenomena are obviously influenced by the beliefs of experiencers; therefore, Madame Blavatsky expressed a different orientation to phenomenal events based upon her knowledge and experiences in comparison, for example, to Sathya Sai Baba or Uri Geller in relation to their rare circumstances.
 
In Benares, one of Olcott and HPB’s visitors was Mohammed Arif, described as “a very learned person.”  Olcott commented about him, “He had an extensive knowledge of the literature of Islam, and showed us a chart he had prepared, on which were inscribed the names of some 1,500 renowned adepts and mystics, from the Prophet down to our times.  He had also a practical knowledge of occult chemistry . . . The old gentleman, while paying full reverence to the achievements of modern science, still maintained that there was yet very much to learn from the ancients about the nature of the elements and their potential combinations.”
 
The final acquaintance named by Olcott in the Second Volume of Old Diary Leaves was —
 

The Hon. Mr. Carmichael, a Secretary to Government, did a plucky thing in having us to dinner to meet his chief colleagues, on top of a wicked paragraph in the leading Madras paper which insinuated that we were secret political agents: this was intended and declared as his personal protest against the injustice.

 
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