Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
By Charles Mackay Oliver

Tribute to H.P.B.
By H.S. Olcott,
Tribute to H.P.B.
By Annie Besant

Tribute to H.P.B.
By Willian Q. Judge

Tribute to H.P.B.
By Constance Wachtmeister
Tribute to H.P.B.
By Isabel Cooper-Oakley
Tribute to H.P.B.
By Charles Johnston
Tribute to H.P.B.
By J.D. Buck

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
By Charles Mackay Oliver

(London -- 1891)

BLAVATSKY sleeps, that wondrous soul who shed
Its strength and beauty spendthrift for the world.
Spite all the hard and cruel malice hurled
From foolish lips that knew not what they said;
Who taught us hope when hope had all but fled,
Who gave us joy when life was living death,
Whose tender message sweeter than the breath
Of soft blown music, charmed and comforted.
But for a space that dauntless Spirit sleeps
Stripped by life’s autumn of its leaves of pain;
To flash Truth’s torch across earth’s darksome deeps;
Grudge this brief respite on the bitter way.

H.S. Olcott, President Founder

1891.

There are certain bereavements which one would prefer to bear in silence, since words are too poor to do them justice. Under such an one the members of the Theosophical Society, and I, especially, are now suffering. Our loss is too great for adequate expression. Ordinary friends and acquaintances may be replaced even in time forgotten, but there is no one to replace Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, nor can she ever be forgotten. Others have certain of her gifts, none has them all. This generation has not seen her like, the next probably will not. Take her all in all, with her merits and demerits, her bright and her dark moods, her virtues and her foibles, she towers above her contemporaries as one of the most picturesque and striking personages in modern history.

Her life, as I have known in this past seventeen years, as friend, colleague, and collaborator, has been a tragedy, the tragedy of a martyr philanthropist. Burning with zeal for the spiritual welfare and intellectual enfranchisement of humanity, moved by no selfish inspiration, giving herself freely and without price to her altruistic work, she has been hounded to her death-day by the slanderer, the bigot, and the Pharisee. These wretches are even unwilling that she should sleep in peace, and now defiling her burial urn in the vain hope of besmirching her memory---as the Roman Catholics have those of Cagliostro and St. Germain, her predecessors---by their mendacious biographies. Their scheme will fail, because she has left behind her a multitude of witnesses ready to do justice to her character and show  the purity of her motives. None more so than myself, for, since our first meeting in 1874, we have been intimate friends, imbued with a common purpose and, in fraternal sympathy, working on parallel lines towards a common goal.

In temperament and abilities as dissimilar as any two persons could well  be, and often disagreeing radically in details, we have yet been of one mind and heart as regards the work in hand and in our reverent allegiance to our Teachers and Masters, its planners and overlookers. We both knew Them personally, she a hundred times more intimately than I, and this made the rupture of our relationship as unthinkable a question as the dissolution of the tie of uterine brotherhood.  She was to me a sister in a peculiar sense, as though there had been no period of beginning to our alliance, but rather a psychical consanguinity which dated from anterior earth-lives.

She was preeminently a double selfed personality, one of them very antipathetic to me and to some others. Her almost constant ill-health and the want of touch between herself and modern society made her irritable, unquiet, and often---I thought---unjust. But she was never commonplace.  I loved her for the other, the higher, self, which was also most mysterious.

One seeing  us together would have said I had her fullest confidence, yet the fact is that, despite seventeen years of intimacy in daily work, she was an enigma to me to the end. Often I would think I knew her perfectly, and presently discover that there were deeper depths in her selfhood I had not sounded. I never could find out who she was, not as Helena Petrovna, daughter of the Hahns and Dolgorukis, whose lineage was easy to trace, but as “H.P.B.,” the mysterious individuality which wrote, and worked wonders .

Her family had no idea whence she drew her exhaustless stream of curious erudition. I wrote and asked her respected aunt the question soon after the writing of Isis Unveiled was begun, but she could afford no clue. Madame Fadeeff replied: “When I last saw her” ----some five years previously--- “she did not know, even in her dreams, the learned things you tell me she is now discussing.”

I helped H.P.B. on that first of her wonderful works, Isis, and saw written or edited every page of the manuscript and every gallery of the proof-sheets. The production of that book, with its numberless quotations and its strange erudition, was quite a miracle enough to satisfy me, once and for all, that she possessed psychical gifts of the highest order. But there was far more proof than ever that. Often and often, when we two were working alone at our desks far into the night, she would illustrate her description of occult powers in man and nature by impromptu experimental phenomena.

More things were thus shown me that have never been written about, than all the wondrous works the public has read about her having done in the presence of other witnesses. Is it strange, then, that all the humbugging  tales and reports by interested critics, about her trickery and charlatanry, failed to shake my knowledge of her real psychical powers? And what wonder that I, who have been favored beyond all others in the Theosophical Society with these valid proofs; who was shown by her the realities of transcendental chemistry and physics, and the marvelous dynamic potencies of the human mind, will, and soul; who was led by her into the delightful path of truth which I have ever since joyfully trodden; and who was made personally to see, know, and talk with the Eastern Teachers ---what wonder that I have loved her as a friend, prized her as a teacher, and shall evermore keep her memory sacred? Living, I might quarrel with her, but dead, I must only bewail her irreparable loss, and redouble my exertions to push on our joint work.

Annie Besant

1891.

Endurance and patience have certainly the crowning qualities of H.P.B. as I have known her during the last years of her life, and as I have heard of her from those fortunate enough to have known her for more years than I can count during her present life. The most salient of her characteristics was implied in these crowning qualities: it was that of strength, steady strength, unyielding as a rock. I have seen weaklings dash themselves up against her, and then whimper that she was hard; but I have also seen her face to face with a woman who had been her cruel enemy---but who was in distress and, as I uncharitably thought, therefore repentant---and every feature was radiant with a divine compassion which only  did not forgive because it would not admit that it had been outraged. The hardness which can be tender is the hardness which is needed in our mollient Western life, in which one is sick of the shams that pass for value, of the falseness that stabs with a smile, and betrays with a kiss. Unconventional ,H.P.B. was always called,  and the adjective was appropriate. She did not regard society conventions as natural laws, and she preferred frankness to compliment.  Above all she had the sense of proportion, and that “rarest sense of all, common sense.”

Looking at her generally, she was much more of a man than a woman. Outspoken, decided, prompt, strong willed, genial, humorous, free from pettiness and without malignity, she was wholly different from the average female type. She judged always on large lines, with wide tolerance for diversities of character and of thought, indifferent to outward appearances if the inner man were just and true.

Personally one of the greatest services she rendered me was placing at my service as an aid to self-knowledge her own deep insight into character. I have laughed to myself when I have heard folk to say that “Madame Blavatsky must be a very bad judge of character, or she would never have trusted people who afterwards betrayed her. “ They did not know that her rule was to give everyone his chance, and she never recked if in thus doing she ran risk of injury to herself. It was always herself she gave away to such persons---never the Society, nor any knowledge they could use to the injury of others.

I watched the course of one such case, a young Judas who pretended friendship, who was admitted by her to stay in her house, who tried ineffectively to find out “secrets,” and went away finally to attack her and try to betray. She talked to him freely enough,  hindered  him in one of his enquiries, tried to lead him the right way, but once or twice I caught those strange eyes of her, of which so much has been said, looking him through with a deep pathetic gaze, turning away at last with a half-breathed sigh. But when anyone was really seeking that most difficult of all knowledge, self-knowledge, then she would use her rare power of insight, would warn of hidden dangers, point to concealed characteristics, unravel the tangled threads of half understood or non understood qualities and defects, and thus guide the student in his effort to know himself, and to escape from the web of illusion. Over and over again, in my own case, she had led me straight to hidden motive, to concealed weakness, to covered pitfall, and any of her pupils who could bear her scrutiny and criticism without resentment might be sure of similar air.

Our nearness to her was not that of the bodily presence, it was that far closed tie which ever binds together teacher and pupil in the venerable philosophy which it was her mission to impart. To us, the mere fact that she was flung off the worn-out garment of her personality is no wise alters the relation between her and us; those of us who were with her in past lives have been separated physically before through “the change that men call death,: and have found each other again on return to “life” on earth.

What has been shall be, and in the true life no separation is possible. For many a year past, her life has been one long torture; she stood at the center of a whirl of forces spiritual and psychic, exposed at the same time to the pressure of the material place. Alone, with none who could wholly understand her, misunderstood, wronged, insulted, and, even when loved, mostly loved in a mistaken way, none except her peers can tell what a hell on earth her life has been. That she is out of it, is matter for rejoicing,  not for sorrowing, for those who really loved her, not themselves in her. The work to which she gave her life is now ours to carry on; the forces behind it are not weakened because H.P.Blavatsky  has departed. It is the work of the Brotherhood, not of any one individual, and while the Brotherhood lives and works, neither doubt nor despair can tough their disciples.  We have but to do our duty: success, as the world counts it, is a thing of no account.

H.P.B.---A Lion Hearted Colleague Passes

Willian Q. Judge
The Path, 1891.

“On the shore stood Hiawatha,
Turned and waved his hand at parting;
On the clear and luminous water
Laughed his birch canoe for sailing
From the pebbles of the margin
Shoved it forth into the water;
Whispered to it, ‘Westward Westerward!’
And with speed it darted forward.
And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, Westward  Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapors,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.
Thus departed Hiawatha
Hiawatha the beloved,
To the Islands of the Blessed.”
Longfellow

That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame, a short period of rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals. The Lord of his body is nameless; dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to come and go; but neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless, unchangeable, and pure, beyond Time itself, and not to be measured. So our old friend and fellow-worker has merely passed for a short time out of sight, but has not given up the work begun so  many ages  ago --- the uplifting of humanity, the destruction of the shackles that enslave the human mind.

I met H.P.B. in 1875 in the city of New York where she was living in Irving Place…..In 1877 she wrote Isis Unveiled in my presence, and was helped in the proof-reading by the President of the Society. This book, she declared to me then, was intended to aid the cause for the advancement of which the Theosophical Society was founded. Of this I speak with knowledge, for I was present and at her request drew up the contract for its publication between her and her New York published. When that document was signed she said to me in the street, “Now I must go to India.”

In November, 1878, she went to India and continued the work of helping her colleagues to spread the Society’s influence there, working  in that mysterious land until she returned to London in 1887. There was then in London but one Branch of the Society ---the London Lodge---the leaders of which thought it should work only with the upper and cultured classes. The effect of H.P.B’s coming there was that Branches began to spring up, so that now they are in many English towns, in Scotland, and in Ireland.  There she founded her magazine Lucifer, there worked night and day for the Society loved by the core of her heart, there wrote The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy, and The Voice of the Silence, and there passed away from a body that had been worn out by unselfish work for the good of the few of our century, but of the many in the centuries to come.
It has been said by detractors that she went to India because she merely left a barren field here,  by sudden impulse and without purpose. But the contrary is the fact. In the very beginning of the Society I drew up with my own hand at her request the diplomas of some members here and there in India who were in correspondence and were of different faiths. Some of them were Parsis. She always said she would have to go to India as soon as the Society was under way here and Isis should be finished.  And when she had been in India sometime, her many letters to me expressed her intention to return to England so as to open the Movement actively and outwardly there in order that the three great points on the world’s surface ---India, England, and America---should have active centers of the Theosophical work.

That she always knew what would be done (to her) by the world in the way of slander and abuse I also know, for in 1875 she told me that she was then embarking on a work that would draw upon her unmerited slander, implacable malice, uninterrupted misunderstanding, constant work, and no worldly reward. Yet in the face of this her lion hearted carried her on. Nor was she unaware of the future of the Society. In 1876 she told me in detail the course of the Society’s growth for future years, of its infancy, of its struggles, of its rise into the “luminous zone” of the public mind; and these prophecies are being all fulfilled.

Much has been said about her “phenomena,” some denying them, others alleging trick and device. Knowing her for so many years so well, and having seen at her hands in private the production of more and more varied phenomena that it has been the good fortune of all others of her friends put together to see, I know for myself that she had control of hidden powerful laws of nature not known to our science, and I also know that she never boasted of her powers, never advertised their possessions, never publicly advised anyone to attempt their acquirement, but always turned the eyes of those who could understand her to a life of altruism based on a knowledge of true philosophy. Id the world thing that her days were spent in deluding her followers by presented phenomena, it is solely because her injudicious friends, against her expressed wish, gave out wonderful stories of “miracles” which can not be proved to a skeptical public and which are not the aim of the Society, not were ever more than mere incidents in the life of H.P.Blavatsky.

Her aim was to elevate the race. Her method was to deal with the mind of the century as she found it, by trying to lead it on step by step; to seek out and educate a few who, appreciating the majesty of the Secret Science and devoted to “the   great orphan Humanity,” could carry on her work with zeal and wisdom; to found a Society --- however small it might be --- whose efforts would inject into the thought of the day ideas, the doctrines, the nomenclature ---.

Constance Wachtmeister
1891

In the month of November, 1885, I went to Wurzburg to visit Madame Blavatsky; I had met her previously in both France and England, but had had only a casual acquaintance with her. I found H.P.B. sick and weary of life, depressed both in mind and body, for she knew what a vast and important mission she had to fulfill, and how difficult it was to find those who were willing to give themselves up to the carrying out of the noble work which was her allotted task in life. She used often to deplore the indifference of the members of the T.S. in this respect, and she said that if she could only raise the veil for one moment, and let them see into the future, what a difference it would make; but each had to work out his own Karma and battle through his difficulties alone.

Madame Blavatsky was settled in comfortable apartments with lofty rooms and with the quiet surrounding she so much needed for the stupendous work in which she was engaged. Every morning at six she used to rise; having a good hour’s work before her breakfast at eight, then, after having read  her letters and newspapers, she would again settle to her writing, sometimes  calling me into the room to tell me that references from books and manuscripts had been given to her by her Master, with the chapter and page quoted, and to ask me whether I could get friends to verify the correctness of these passages in different Public Libraries: for as she read everything reversed in the Astral Light, it would be easy for her to make mistakes in dates and numbers----and in some instances it was found that the number of the page had been reversed, for instance 23 would be found on page 32, etc.

Between one and two o’clock was Madame Blavatsky’s dinner hour, the time varying to accommodate her work, and then without any repose she would immediately set herself at her table again, writing until six o’clock, when tea would be served.

The “old lady’s” relaxation during the evening would be her “Patiences,”  laying out the cards while I read to her letters received during the day or scraps from newspapers which I thought might interest her. Between nine and ten o’clock H.P.B. retired to rest, usually taking some slight refreshment, and would read her Russian newspapers until midnight, when her lamps was put out, and all would be quiet until the next morning, when the used routine recommenced . And so, day after day, the same unvarying life went on, only broken by the malicious Hodgson report which caused waves of disturbance to reach us from all sides. H.P.B. said to me one evening: “You cannot imagine what is to feel so many adverse thoughts and currents directed against you; it is like the prickings of a thousand needles, and I have continually to be erecting a wall of protection around me.” I asked her whether she knew from whom these unfriendly thoughts came, and she answered:

“Yes: unfortunately I do, and I am always trying to shut my eyes so as not to see and know. “ And to prove to me that this was the case, she would tell me of letters that had been written, quoting passages from them, and these actually arrived a day or two afterwards, I being able to verify the correctness of the sentences.

All who have known and loved H.P.B. have felt what a charm there was about her, how truly kind and lovable she was; at times such a bright lovable childish  nature seemed to beam around her, and a spirit of joyous fun would sprinkle in her countenance, and cause the most winning expression that I have ever seen on a human face. One of that marvels of her character was, that to everybody she was different. I have never seen her treat two persons alike. The weak traits in every one’s character were known to her at once, and the extraordinary way in which she would probe them was surprising. By those who lived in daily contact with her the knowledge of Self was gradually acquired, and by those who chose to benefit by her practical way of teaching, progress could be made. But to many of her pupils the process was unpalatable, for it is never pleasant to be brought to face with one’s own weakness; and so, many turned from her, but those who could stand the test and remain true to her, would recognize within themselves the inner development which alone leads to Occultism.

A truer and more faithful friend one could never have than H.P.B., and I think it the greatest  blessing of my life to have lived with her in such close intimacy and until my death I shall try to further the noble cause for which she slaved and suffered so much.

Isabel Cooper-Oakley
1891

In all these years I have known our teacher and friend I have never known her to utter one ungenerous word of her greatest enemy; she was the practical personification of charity and forgiveness, and was always ready to give another chance of doing better to any one who had failed her. It is said that “familiarity breeds contempt,” but it is a striking fact that the more closely and intimately we were united to H.P.B. in everyday life, the more did we learn to respect, nay to reverence her. A wonderful and mysterious line of demarcation always surrounded her, severing her inner spiritual life from her outer and apparently ordinary one. Her every moment was devoted to the work she had been sent to do; nothing was too small or minute for her most careful attention.

She passed away like a sentinel at his post, in the armchair in which she taught and wrote---the best and truest of teachers, the most faithful and untiring of Messengers.