70 Biography of a Yogislaves. While “under control,” their own will is set aside, and their actions,
their speech, and their very consciousness, are directed by that of another.
They are helpless to do, or say, or think, or see what they desire, as the
subject of the mesmerist, whose body is a mere machine governed by a will
external to and dominant over itself. The “materializing medium” must
even, it appears, lend from the more ethereal portions of his frame, some
of the matter that goes to form the evanescent materialized shapes of the
departed.^35In contrast to this assessment, Olcott referred to Blavatsky, whom he had only
recently met at a Spiritualist demonstration in Chittendom, Vermont, as “one of
the most remarkable mediums in the world” but qualified that “her mediumship
is totally different from that of any other person I have ever met; for, instead of
being controlled by spirits to do their will, it is she who seems to control them
to do her bidding.” This he attributes to Blavatsky’s lengthy sojourn in “Oriental
lands” where “what we recognize as Spiritualism, has for years been regarded as
the mere rudimentary developments of a system which seems to have established
such relations between mortals and the immortals as to enable certain of the for-
mer to have dominion over many of the latter.”^36
Blavatsky does appear to have traveled extensively between leaving her
newly acquired husband, the vice- governor Nikifor Vladimirovich Blavatsky,
in 1849 and turning up in New York in 1873. However, her exact itinerary
during this lengthy period is largely uncorroborated and, while not strictly
impossible, it is highly unlikely that a single white woman did in fact hike
through the mountains of Tibet for several years in the mid- nineteenth
century. Regardless of whether she had in fact ever set foot on South Asian
soil prior to 1886, when she and Olcott relocated the Society’s headquarters
from New York to Adyar in Chennai, Blavatsky was singlehandedly respon-
sible for opening the floodgates of Indian metaphysical categories that over
the next century would thoroughly suffuse Western metaphysical spiritual-
ity. Reciprocally, however, these same categories would return to the source in
the writings of Indian Theosophists— or even more numerous Theosophical
sympathizers— laden with new Western valences. Such was the story of ākāśa,
to which we shall return shortly.
Blavatsky’s command of Oriental wisdom was famously credited to a brother-
hood of Masters— or Mahatmas, as they would later come to be called— whose
presence spanned all the nations and ages of human civilization. When Blavatsky
was not communing with the Masters through automatic writing, to which she
attributes much of her literary corpus, they would communicate through let-
ters “precipitated” from the ceiling as they materialized out of the subtle etheric