First appeared in
the Boston Globe.
Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics,
Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington (Schocken
Books, NY, 1995, 480 pages $27.50)
1848 was a special year. In Europe, revolutions were breaking
out. In the United States spirits were breaking through. In 1848, using the
adolescent Fox sisters as vehicles, the Devil — referred to as Splitfoot by the
girls — and the dead tapped out messages in Hydesville, New York. The news from
beyond was good: death was change rather than cessation. Better yet, the dead
lived on in an atmosphere free of fire and brimstone, Splitfoot having run out
of hot stuff, or the will to use it, long ago.
As Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon shows, Ms. Huffington’s fusion
of politics and spiritualism is peculiar only in its conservative orientation.
(Is Splitfoot, out of hellfire but not necessarily mischief, responsible for Rush,
Newt, and — since he’s said to flourish in the details — even the Huffingtons?)
Politics and spiritualism were allied from the start, joined in “an
‘alternative synthesis’ which included vegetarianism, feminism, dress reform,
homeopathy and every variety of social and religious dissent.” America, from
the Fox sisters on, never lacked for a New Age.
The Russian born Madame Blavatsky was a central figure of
the spiritual movement, larger than life and maybe even larger than afterlife.
As a child, she gave notice of prowess in spiritual affairs by disclosing the
past lives of her stuffed animals. As an adult, she became the dominatrix of
occultism, bringing strong men to heel and stealing their hearts despite her increasing
obesity. Thomas Edison was member of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, as was
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s collaborator, and Abner Doubleday, credited
with inventing baseball.
Spiritualism was one of the few venues in which women could openly
exercise authority over men, and they seized on the opportunity. Role reversal
was the norm, a kind of transcendental kinkyness quite common. The author notes
that “the electricity provided by variations on the male/female,
submissive/dominant combination was central” to the success of the spiritualist
enterprise.
Disdaining Charles Darwin’s materialism, spiritualists believed
the next step in human evolution could not be accomplished without the guidance
of strong, often authoritarian leaders endowed with mastery of esoteric doctrine.
After Madame Blavatsky, the lineage described by Mr. Washington includes Annie
Besant, Krishnamurti, and George Gurdjieff, with a supporting cast that numbers
Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley.
Mr. Washington is good at the memorable vignette, describing
Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy’s Vermont farm, for example, as a
spiritualist’s vaudeville, where levitation was so common it amounted to a kind
of sleep disorder. “No sooner were the children tucked into bed at night,” he
writes, “than they tended to float up to the ceiling.” He is well-versed in intellectual
history, informing us, for example, that the Steiner schools, established after
World War I and suriving until today, were founded, in part, to spare the next
generation the temptations of war.
The major weakness of Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon lies in the
author’s tendency to wink at the reader, letting us know he knows a charlatan
when he sees one. And this would be a better book if Mr. Washington let the
principals speak more often in their own words. Finally, the pattern of groups
forming, hopes rising, leaders clashing, hopes collapsing occurs so often as to
impose a kind of uniformity on the narrative.
Nevertheless, at a time when interest in the Course on
Miracles is sufficient to fill large halls, when The Celestine Prophecy is a bestseller
in perpetuity, and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington is offered her own
television show, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is a provocative guide to an aspect
of our history we had best not forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment