4
Seeing li Believing
The original publicity surrounding the investigation of the fairy pho-
tographs led to increased interest in Hodson's clairvoyant powers. In
January of I923 a group of wealthy theosophists in London formed a
scientific group to "correlate modern scientific views with Theo-
sophy." They invited Hodson to collaborate with his remarkable clair-
voyant abilities.
The Theosophical Society, brainchild of that fabulous but contro-
versial Russian psychic, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, had been founded
in New York in 1875 with the help of American journalist-author
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who was fascinated by the occult.
Blavatsky, born in the north Caucasus in 1831 to a Russian army
colonel and a princess descended from early Russian rulers, claimed to
have lived from childhood in two worlds. One was physical, the other
spiritual, and the latter was peopled by visible and invisible compan-
ions. She tells how one of these manifested to her in the flesh when she
was sixteen as she strolled in London's Hyde Park. Appearing in the
guise of an Indian rajput known as Prince Koot Hoomi, he told her she
would one day come for training to his ashram in the Himalayas, a
prophecy that seemed improbable at the time.
Married by her parents at seventeen to a Russian general three
times her age, Blavatsky, to avoid the nuptial bed, escaped in disguise' to
travel the world, sustaining herself for years by performing feats of ap-
parent magic. In India and Tibet she claimed to have acquired, as
promised by Koot Hoorni, a considerable knowledge of arcana under
the instruction of a series of adepts and to have been initiated into the
mysteries.