In the Hall of Magic Mirrors: Reckoning with Madame H.P. Blavatsky
The Victorian-era occultist eludes facile analysis
How controversial is globe-spanning Russian occultist Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), whose exploits and exotic claims enthralled Victorians and future generations?
Here’s a story from my publishing days. In 2012, at the corner of Penguin Random House focused on metaphysical literature, I issued an excellent biography of the nineteenth-century icon by historian Gary Lachman.
The book received wide praise — as well as scrutinizing and caustic coverage in arteries of mainstream culture, including Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review. We had never sent them the book nor sought their attention.
I was surprised that bastions of lettered opinion dedicated significant space to a mystic traveler who died in 1891. Unremarkably, Blavatsky was depicted as a peddler of fake mysticism, manufactured mediumistic tricks, and charlatanry.
And that, mind you, is the duller end of the critics’ stick. The sharper one, pervasive online, calls her a purveyor of colonialism, genocide, and even a forerunner of Nazism.
Into the third decade of the twenty-first century, this figure of minor nobility who traversed the globe in search of…
