Whatever happened to the heroes

Plato

Swedenborg

Victoria Helen McCrae Duncan (25 November 1897 – 6 December 1956) was a Scottish medium best known as the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act 1735 for fraudulent claims. She was famous for producing ectoplasm which was proven to be made from cheesecloth.[1][2][3][4]

Early life

Victoria Helen MacFarlane was born in Callander, Perthshire on 25 November 1897, the daughter of Archibald McFarlane, a slater,[5] and Isabella Rattray. At school, she alarmed her fellow pupils with her dire prophecies and hysterical behaviour, to the distress of her mother (a member of the Presbyterian church).[5] After leaving school, she worked at Dundee Royal Infirmary, and in 1916 she married Henry Duncan, a cabinet maker and wounded war veteran, who was supportive of her supposed paranormal talents. A mother of six, she also worked part-time in a bleach factory.

In 1928, the photographer Harvey Metcalfe attended a series of séances at the house of Duncan. During a séance he took various flash photographs of Duncan and her alleged “materialization” spirits including her spirit guide “Peggy”.[6] The photographs that were taken reveal the spirits to be fraudulently produced, such as a doll made from a painted papier-mâché mask draped in an old sheet.[7]

In 1931, the London Spiritualist Alliance (LSA) examined Duncan’s method. An early examination of pieces of Duncan’s ectoplasm revealed it was made of cheesecloth, paper mixed with the white of egg and lavatory paper stuck together.[8] One of Duncan’s tricks was to swallow and regurgitate some of her ectoplasm, and she was persuaded to swallow a tablet of methylene blue before one of her séances by the LSA committee to rule out any chance of this trick being performed, and because of this no ectoplasm appeared.[8] The committee in a report concluded that the “material was swallowed by Mrs Duncan at some time previous to the sitting and subsequently regurgitated by her for the purpose of exhibition.”[9]

Harry Price investigation

A piece of ectoplasm from one of Duncan’s early séances was obtained and secured in a bottle of distilled water. It was given to the psychical researcher Harry Price who was originally enthusiastic about the sample. However, when he gave the sample to a chemist for an analysis it was discovered to be made from egg white mixed with chemicals. Price would later duplicate Duncan’s ectoplasm with similar substances.[10]

In 1931, Price paid Duncan £50 to perform a number of test séances. She was suspected of swallowing cheesecloth which was then regurgitated as “ectoplasm”.[4][11] Price had proven through analysis of a sample of ectoplasm produced by Duncan that it was made of cheesecloth.[12] She reacted violently at attempts to X-ray her, running from the laboratory and making a scene in the street, where her husband had to restrain her, destroying the controlled nature of the test. According to Price in a report of the mediumship of Duncan:[10]

At the conclusion of the fourth seance we led the medium to a settee and called for the apparatus. At the sight of it, the lady promptly went into a trance. She recovered, but refused to be X-rayed. Her husband went up to her and told her it was painless. She jumped up and gave him a smashing blow on the face which sent him reeling. Then she went for Dr. William Brown who was present. He dodged the blow. Mrs. Duncan, without the slightest warning, dashed out into the street, had an attack of hysteria and began to tear her seance garment to pieces. She clutched the railings and screamed and screamed. Her husband tried to pacify her. It was useless. I leave the reader to visualize the scene. A seventeen-stone woman, clad in black sateen tights, locked to the railings, screaming at the top of her voice. A crowd collected and the police arrived. The medical men with us explained the position and prevented them from fetching the ambulance. We got her back into the Laboratory and at once she demanded to be X-rayed. In reply, Dr. William Brown turned to Mr. Duncan and asked him to turn out his pockets. He refused and would not allow us to search him. There is no question that his wife had passed him the cheese-cloth in the street. However, they gave us another seance and the “control’ said we could cut off a piece of “teleplasm” when it appeared. The sight of half-a-dozen men, each with a pair of scissors waiting for the word, was amusing. It came and we all jumped. One of the doctors got hold of the stuff and secured a piece. The medium screamed and the rest of the “teleplasm” went down her throat. This time it wasn’t cheese-cloth. It proved to be paper, soaked in white of egg, and folded into a flattened tube… Could anything be more infantile than a group of grown-up men wasting time, money, and energy on the antics of a fat female crook.

Price in his report published photographs of Duncan in his laboratory that revealed fake ectoplasm made from cheesecloth, rubber gloves and cut-out heads from magazine covers which she pretended to her audiences were spirits.[9][13] Psychologist William McDougall, who attended two of the séances, pronounced her “whole performance fraudulent” in an appendix to the report.[14]

Following the report written by Price, Duncan’s former maid Mary McGinlay confessed in detail to having aided Duncan in her mediumship tricks, and Duncan’s husband admitted that the ectoplasm materializations were the result of regurgitation.[9][15]

Duncan frequently had nosebleeds during séances; William Brown suggested that this was another of Duncan’s hiding places for her fake ectoplasm.[16] In 1936, psychical researcher Nandor Fodor offered money to Duncan if she would be filmed with an infrared camera during a séance; she refused.[17]

1933 conviction

In a séance on 6 January 1933 in Edinburgh, it is alleged that the spirit of a little girl called Peggy emerged in the séance room. A sitter named Esson Maule grabbed her and the lights were turned on and the spirit was revealed to be made from a stockinette undervest.[10] The police were called and Duncan was prosecuted and fined £10.[18] The undervest was used as evidence which led to Duncan’s conviction of fraudulent mediumship at the Edinburgh Sheriff Court trial on 11 May 1933.[19]

The spiritualist journal Light endorsed the court decision that Duncan was fraudulent and supported Price’s investigation that revealed her ectoplasm was cheesecloth.[20] Duncan’s husband was also suspected of acting as her accomplice by hiding her fake ectoplasm.[4]

Ectoplasm sample

Historian Malcolm Gaskill who examined holdings from the Society for Psychical Research at the Cambridge University Library found a sample Duncan’s ectoplasm.[21] The ectoplasm was proven to be a made from a length of artificial silk.[22] In 2018, the sample was displayed at the Spellbound exhibition on the history of magic, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.[21] The sample is now held at Cambridge University Library and a photograph can be seen on their website.[23]

HMS Barham sinking

During World War II, in November 1941, Duncan held a séance in Portsmouth at which she claimed the spirit materialization of a sailor told her HMS Barham had been sunk.[9] Because the sinking of HMS Barham was revealed, in strict confidence, only to the relatives of casualties, and not announced to the public until late January 1942, the Navy started to take an interest in her activities. Two lieutenants were among her audience at a séance on 14 January 1944. One of these was a Lieutenant Worth who was not impressed as a white cloth figure had appeared behind the curtains claiming to be his aunt but he had no deceased aunt. In the same sitting another figure appeared claiming to be his sister but Worth replied his sister was alive and well.[9] Worth was disgusted by the séance and reported it to the police. This was followed up on 19 January, when undercover policemen arrested her at another séance as a white-shrouded manifestation appeared.[24] This proved to be Duncan herself, in a white cloth which she attempted to conceal when discovered, and she was arrested.[9][25]

Researcher Graeme Donald wrote that Duncan could have easily found out about HMS Barham and she had no genuine psychic powers. According to Donald:

The loss of HMS Barham, torpedoed off the coast of Egypt on 25 November 1941, was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement. So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on – hardly a closely guarded secret. In short, news of the sinking spread like wildfire; Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit.[26]

A leak concerning HMS Barham was later discovered. A secretary of the First Lord had been indiscreet to Professor Michael Postan of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Postan said that he believed he had been told officially, and was not arrested.[27]

Duncan was found to be in possession of a mocked-up HMS Barham hat-band.[28] This apparently related to an alleged manifestation of the spirit of a dead sailor on HMS Barham, although Duncan apparently did not know that after 1939 sailors’ hat bands carried only ‘H.M.S.’ and did not identify their ship.[9] She was initially arrested under section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, a minor offence tried by magistrates. The authorities regarded the case as more serious, and eventually discovered section 4 of the Witchcraft Act 1735, covering fraudulent “spiritual” activity, which was triable before a jury. Charged alongside her for conspiracy to contravene this Act were Ernest and Elizabeth Homer, who operated the Psychic centre in Portsmouth, and Frances Brown, who was Duncan’s agent and went with her to set up séances. There were seven counts, two of conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act, two of obtaining money by false pretences, and three of the common law offence of public mischief. The prosecution may be explained by the mood of suspicion prevailing at the time: the authorities were afraid that she could continue to reveal classified information, whatever her source was.[29] There were also concerns that she was exploiting the recently bereaved, as the Recorder noted when passing sentence.[30]

Duncan’s trial for fraudulent witchcraft was a minor cause célèbre in wartime London. Alfred Dodd, a historian and senior Freemason, testified he was convinced she was authentic. The trial was complicated by the fact that a police raid on the séance in Portsmouth, leading to the arrest of Helen Duncan, yielded no physical evidence of the fraudulent use of cheesecloth, and was therefore based entirely on witness testimony, the majority of which denied any wrongdoing.[31] Duncan was barred by the judge from demonstrating her alleged powers as part of her defence against being fraudulent. The jury brought in a guilty verdict on count one, and the judge then discharged them from giving verdicts on the other counts, as he held that they were alternative offences for which Duncan might have been convicted had the jury acquitted her on the first count. Duncan was imprisoned for nine months, Brown for four months and the Homers were bound over.[31] After the verdict, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, complaining about the misuse of court resources on the “obsolete tomfoolery” of the charge.[32]

Repeal of the Witchcraft Act

In 1944, Duncan was one of the last people convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1735, which made falsely claiming to procure spirits a crime. She was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. When convicted, she cried out “I have done nothing; is there a God?”.[30][33]

On her release in 1945, Duncan promised to stop conducting séances, but she was arrested during another one in 1956. She died at her home in Edinburgh a short time later.[5] Duncan’s trial almost certainly contributed to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, which was contained in the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 promoted by Walter Monslow, Labour Member of Parliament for Barrow-in-Furness. The campaign to repeal the Act had largely been led by Thomas Brooks, another Labour MP, who was a spiritualist. Duncan’s original conviction still stood, and it was the subject of a sustained campaign to have it overturned.[34][35]

Death

She died at her home in Edinburgh, on 6 December 1956, a short time after another seance.[5] Contrary to what some spiritualists have written, there was nothing strange or unusual about Duncan’s death; nor was it caused by the police disturbing her “trance.”[9] Duncan’s medical records indicated that she had a long history of poor health, and as early as 1944 she was described as an obese woman who could move only slowly as she suffered from heart trouble.[9]

Legacy

After her death, Duncan was cited in paranormal and parapsychological books as an example of a fraudulent medium.[36] However, she retained supporters amongst the spiritualist community.[37] On this, Jenny Hazelgrove has noted:

Her Opponents condemned her mediumship out of hand while her supporters took up the opposite position. Any suspicious aspects of the Duncan mediumship – the wood-pulp ‘ectoplasm’, the ‘ectoplasmic’ drapery that resembled cheese cloth – were glossed over by her followers in the interests of producing a wholly idealised picture of her life and mediumship.[38]

The psychical researcher Simeon Edmunds also noted that spiritualists have a history of ignoring the evidence of fraud in the Duncan case. He criticized the spiritualist press such as Psychic News for biased reporting and distorting facts.[9] Science writer Mary Roach in her book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2007) favorably mentioned Price’s methods in debunking Duncan as a fraudulent medium.[4]

Inspired by her legacy, new wave of British heavy metal band Seventh Son recorded and released a song ‘The Last Witch In England’ in 2009, depicting her life and her ‘prediction’ of the sinking of HMS Barham.[39]

The naval investigation and subsequent trial was dramatized as a radio play. The Last Witch Trial by Melissa Murray, starring Joanna Monro as Duncan and Indira Varma as the undercover investigator, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 4 June 2010.[40]

Descendants and supporters of Duncan have campaigned on several occasions to have her posthumously pardoned of witchcraft charges. Petitions for a posthumous pardon were rejected by the Scottish Parliament in 2001, 2008, and 2012.[41] Duncan’s supporters maintain a website and online petition where they continue to campaign for her pardon.[42]

Edgar Cayce

Born      March 18, 1877

Christian County, Kentucky, U.S.

Died       January 3, 1945 (aged 67)

Some religious scholars and thinkers such as author Michael York consider him the true founder and a principal source of the most characteristic beliefs of the New Age movement.[4]

Early life

Edgar Cayce was born on March 18, 1877, near Beverly, south of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He was one of six children of farmers Carrie Elizabeth (née Major)[5] and Leslie Burr Cayce.[6] As a child he was alleged to have seen his deceased grandfather. He regarded what he saw as incorporeal because he could see through it if he looked hard enough.[7]

He found it very difficult to keep his mind on his lessons at school.[8]

He was taken to church when he was 10, and from then he read the Bible, becoming engrossed, and completing a dozen readings by the time he was 12.[7] In May 1889, while reading the Bible in his hut in the woods, he ‘saw’ a woman with wings who told him that his prayers were answered, and asked him what he wanted most of all. He was frightened, but he said that most of all he wanted to help others, especially sick children. He decided he would like to be a missionary.[9]

The next night, after a complaint from the school teacher, his father ruthlessly tested him for spelling, eventually knocking him out of his chair with exasperation. At that point, Cayce ‘heard’ the voice of the lady who had appeared the day before. She told him that if he could sleep a little ‘they’ could help him. He begged for a rest and put his head on the spelling book. When his father came back into the room and woke him up, he knew all the answers. In fact, he could repeat anything in the book. His father thought he had been fooling before and knocked him out of the chair again. Eventually, Cayce used all his school books that way.[10]

By 1892, the teacher regarded Cayce as his best student. On being questioned, Cayce told the teacher that he saw pictures of the pages in the books. His father became proud of this accomplishment and spread it around, resulting in Cayce becoming “different” from his peers.[11]

Shortly after this, Cayce exhibited an ability to diagnose in his sleep. He was struck on the base of the spine by a ball in a school game, after which he began to act very strangely, and eventually was put to bed. He went to sleep and diagnosed the cure, which his family prepared and which cured him as he slept. His father boasted that his son was, “the greatest fellow in the world when he’s asleep”.[12] However, this ability was not demonstrated again for several years.[13]

Cayce’s uncommon personality is also shown in an unusual incident in which he rode a certain mule back to the farmhouse at the end of a work day. This stunned everyone there, as the mule could not be ridden. The owner, thinking it may be time to break the animal in again, attempted to mount it but was immediately thrown off. Cayce left for his family in the city that evening.[14]

In December 1893, the Cayce family moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and lived at 705 West Seventh on the southeast corner of Seventh and Young Streets. During this time, Cayce received an eighth-grade education, is said by the Association for Research and Enlightenment to have noticed his clairvoyant abilities,[15] and left the family farm to pursue various forms of employment.

Cayce’s education stopped in the ninth grade because his family could not afford the costs involved.[16] A ninth-grade education was often considered more than sufficient for working-class children. Much of the remainder of Cayce’s younger years would be characterized by a search for employment. On March 14, 1897, Cayce became engaged to Gertrude Evans.

Throughout his life, Cayce was drawn to church as a member of the Disciples of Christ. He read the entire Bible once a year every year, attended church and taught Sunday school,[17] and recruited missionaries. He said he could see auras around people, spoke to angels, and heard voices of departed relatives. In his early years, he agonized over whether these prophetic abilities were spiritually delivered from the highest source.[18]

In 1900, Cayce formed a business partnership with his father to sell Woodmen of the World Insurance; however, in March he was struck by severe laryngitis that resulted in a complete loss of speech.[16] Unable to work, he lived at home with his parents for almost a year. He then decided to take up the trade of photography, an occupation that would exert less strain on his voice. He began an apprenticeship at the photography studio of W. R. Bowles in Hopkinsville, and eventually became quite talented in his trade.[19]

In 1901, a traveling stage hypnotist and entertainer named Hart, who referred to himself as “The Laugh Man”, was performing at the Hopkinsville Opera House. Hart heard about Cayce’s throat condition and offered to attempt a cure. Cayce accepted his offer, and the experiment was conducted in the office of Manning Brown, the local throat specialist. Cayce’s voice allegedly returned while in a hypnotic trance but disappeared on awakening. Hart tried a posthypnotic suggestion that the voice would continue to function after the trance, but this proved unsuccessful.[20][21]

Since Hart had appointments at other cities, he could not continue his hypnotic treatments of Cayce, but admitted he had failed because Cayce would not go into the third stage of hypnosis to take a suggestion. A New York hypnotist, John Duncan Quackenboss, found the same impediment but, after returning to New York, suggested that Cayce should be prompted to take over his own case while in the second stage of hypnosis. The only local hypnotist, Al Layne, offered to help Cayce restore his voice.[22] In subsequent sessions, when Cayce wanted to indicate that the connection was made to the person or the “entity” that was requesting the reading, he would generally start off with, “We have the body.” After 20 minutes, Cayce, still in a trance, declared the treatment over. On awakening, his voice was alleged to have remained normal. Apparently, relapses occurred, but were said to have been corrected by Layne in the same way, where eventually the cure was permanent.

Layne asked Cayce to describe Layne’s own ailments and suggest cures, and reportedly found the results both accurate and effective. Layne regarded the ability as clairvoyance. Layne suggested that Cayce offer his trance healing to the public. Cayce was reluctant as he had no idea what he was prescribing while asleep, and whether the remedies were safe. He also told Layne he himself did not want to know anything about the patient as it was not relevant. He finally agreed, on the condition that readings would be free. He began, with Layne’s help, to offer free treatments to the townspeople. Layne described Cayce’s method as, “… a self-imposed hypnotic trance which induces clairvoyance”.[23] Reports of Cayce’s work appeared in the newspapers, which inspired many postal inquiries.[24] Cayce stated he could work just as effectively using a letter from the individual as with the person being present in the room. Given only the person’s name and location, Cayce said he could diagnose the physical and mental conditions of what he termed “the entity”, and then provide a remedy. Cayce was still reticent and worried, as “one dead patient was all he needed to become a murderer”. His fiancée, Gertrude Evans, agreed with him. Few people knew what he was up to. There was a common belief at the time that subjects of hypnosis eventually went insane, or at least that their health suffered.[25] Cayce soon became famous, and people from around the world sought his advice through correspondence.

In May 1902 he got a bookshop job in the town of Bowling Green where he boarded with some young professionals, two of whom were doctors.[26] He lost his voice while there and Layne came to help effect the normal cure, finally visiting every week. Cayce, still worried, kept the meetings secret, and continued to refuse money for his readings. He invented a card game called Pit or Board of Trade, simulating wheat market trading, that became popular, but when he sent the idea to a game company they copyrighted it and he got no returns. He still refused to give readings for money.[27]

Cayce and Gertrude Evans married on June 17, 1903, and she moved to Bowling Green with him. They had three children: Hugh Lynn Cayce (March 16, 1907 – July 4, 1982), Milton Porter Cayce (March 28, 1911 – May 17, 1911), and Edgar Evans Cayce (February 9, 1918 – February 15, 2013).[6][28] She still disapproved of the readings, and Cayce still agonized over the morality of them. A few days later Layne revealed the activity to the professionals at the boarding house, one of whom was a magistrate and journalist, after which state medical authorities forced Layne to close his practice. He left to acquire osteopathic qualifications in Franklin. Cayce and Gertrude accepted the resulting publicity as best they could, greatly aided by the diplomacy of the young doctors.[29]

Cayce and a relative opened a photographic studio in Bowling Green, while the doctors formed a committee with some colleagues to investigate the phenomenon, with Cayce’s co-operation. All the experiments confirmed the accuracy of the readings. However, Cayce refused a lucrative offer to go into business. After a violent examination by doctors while in a trance, Cayce refused any more investigations, declaring that he would only do readings for those who needed help and believed in the readings.[30]

In 1906 and 1907 fires burned down his two photographic studios, leading to bankruptcy. Between the two fires, his first son was born on March 16, 1907. He became debt free by 1909, although completely broke, and ready to start again. In 1907, outstanding diagnostic successes in the family helped his confidence. He again refused an offer to go into business, this time with homeopath Wesley H. Ketchum from Hopkinsville, who was introduced by his father. He found a job at the H. P. Tresslar photography firm.[31]

However, Ketchum was persistent, spread information in various medical circles, and in October 1910 got written up in the press. When a reporter contacted Cayce, he explained to the reporter that he somehow had the ability to easily go into the intuitive sleep when he wanted to, and this was different from how he went to sleep normally like everyone else. When asked the mechanism of the readings via the sleep method, they were told that it happened via the capabilities of the subconscious mind.[32]

Ketchum again urged Cayce to join a business company. After soul searching the whole night, Cayce finally accepted the offer under certain conditions, including that he did not take money for the readings. He was prophesizing. Cayce read the back readings, but they contained so many technical terms that he gained no more understanding of what he was doing. He preferred to put the readings on a more scientific basis, but only the doctors in Hopkinsville would cooperate, whereas most of the patients were not in that locality. Also, doctors from all specialties were needed as the treatments prescribed varied widely.[33]

Edgar Cayce, and especially Gertrude, still did not give therapeutic priority to the readings and supposedly lost their second child because of this reticence. When Gertrude became fatally ill with tuberculosis, they used the readings after the doctor had given up. Miraculously, the treatment cured her. Shortly after this, in 1912, Cayce, whose everyday conscious mind was not aware during the readings, discovered that Ketchum had not been honest about them, and had also used them to gamble for finance. He argued in defense that the medical profession were not backing them. Cayce quit the company immediately and went back to the Tresslar photography firm in Selma, Alabama.[34]

1912–1923: Selma, Alabama period

Building (second from left) in downtown Selma, Alabama, where Cayce lived and worked from 1912 to 1923.

Historic marker in front of the building

Cayce’s work grew in volume as his fame grew. He asked for voluntary donations to support himself and his family so that he could practice full-time. To help raise money he invented Pit, a card game based on the commodities trading at the Chicago Board of Trade, and the game is still sold today. He continued to work in an apparent trance state with a hypnotist all his life. His wife and eldest son later replaced Layne in this role. A secretary, Gladys Davis, recorded his readings in shorthand.[24]

The growing fame of Cayce along with the popularity he received from newspapers attracted several eager commercially minded men who wanted to seek a fortune by using his clairvoyant abilities. Even though Cayce was reluctant to help them, he was persuaded to give his readings, which left him dissatisfied with himself and unsuccessful. A cotton merchant offered him a hundred dollars a day for his readings about the daily outcomes in the cotton market; however, despite his poor finances, Cayce refused the merchant’s offer.[35] Some wanted to know where to hunt for treasures while others wanted to know the outcome of horse races.[36]

In 1923, Arthur Lammers, a wealthy printer and student of metaphysics, persuaded Cayce to give readings on philosophical subjects.[37] Cayce was told by Lammers that, while in his trance state, he spoke of Lammers’ past lives and of reincarnation, something Lammers believed in. Reincarnation was a popular subject of the day but is not an accepted part of Christian doctrine. Because of this, Cayce questioned his stenographer about what he said in his trance state and remained unconvinced. He challenged Lammers’ charge that he had validated astrology and reincarnation in the following dialogue:

Cayce: I said all that?… I couldn’t have said all that in one reading.

Lammers: No. But you confirmed it. You see, I have been studying metaphysics for years, and I was able by a few questions, by the facts you gave, to check what is right and what is wrong with a whole lot of the stuff I’ve been reading. The important thing is that the basic system which runs through all the religions, is backed up by you.[38]

Cayce’s stenographer recorded the following:

In this we see the plan of development of those individuals set upon this plane, meaning the ability to enter again into the presence of the Creator and become a full part of that creation.

Insofar as this entity is concerned, this is the third appearance on this plane, and before this one, as the monk. We see glimpses in the life of the entity now as were shown in the monk, in this mode of living. The body is only the vehicle ever of that spirit and soul that waft through all times and ever remain the same.

Cayce was quite unconvinced that he had been referring to the doctrine of reincarnation, and the best Lammers could offer was that the reading “opens up the door” and to go on to share his beliefs and knowledge with Cayce.[39] Lammers had come to him with quite a bit of information of his own to share with Cayce and seemed intent upon convincing Cayce now that he felt the reading had confirmed his strongly-held beliefs.[40] Twelve years earlier Cayce had briefly alluded to reincarnation. In reading 4841–1, given April 22, 1911, Cayce referred to the soul being “transmigrated”. Because Cayce’s readings were not systematically recorded until 1923, at that point no mention of reincarnation took place but it is possible that he may have mentioned reincarnation and astrology in other earlier readings though none recorded.

1923–1925: Dayton, Ohio period

Lammers asked Cayce to come to Dayton to pursue metaphysical truth via the readings. Cayce eventually agreed and went to Dayton. Gertrude Cayce was dubious but interested. There, Cayce produced much metaphysical information, which Cayce tried to reconcile with Christianity. Lammers declared that the fifth chapter of Matthew was the constitution of Christianity and the Sermon on the Mount was its Declaration of Independence. It appeared that Cayce’s subconscious mind was as much at home with the language of metaphysics as it was with the language of anatomy and medicine.[41]

Lammers wanted to ask the purpose of readings of Cayce’s clairvoyance, and to put up money for an organization supporting Cayce’s healing methods. Cayce decided to accept the work and asked his family to join him in Dayton as soon as they could. But by the time the Cayces had arrived there, near the end of 1923, Lammers found himself in financial difficulties and could be of no use. Many people viewed Cayce as of no use. Cayce used his knowledge of the Bible to convince his family the word of the Bible.[42]

It was at this time Cayce directed his activities to provide readings centered around health. The remedies that were channeled often involved the use of unusual electrotherapy, ultraviolet light, diet, massage,less mental work and more relaxation in sand on the beach. His remedies were coming under the scrutiny of the American Medical Association and Cayce felt that it was time to legitimize the operations with the aid of licensed medical practitioners. In 1925 Cayce reported while in a trance, “the voice” had instructed him to move to Virginia Beach, Virginia[43] across the street from the beach. He was informed that the sand’s crystals would have curative properties to promote rapid healing.

Cayce’s mature period, in which he created the several institutions that survived him, can be considered to have started in 1925. By this time he was a professional psychic with a small number of employees and volunteers.[44] The readings increasingly came to involve occult or esoteric themes.[45]

Money was extremely scarce, but help came from interested persons. The idea of an association and a hospital was mooted again, but the readings insisted on Virginia Beach, not suiting most of the people. Gertrude Cayce began to conduct all the readings. Morton Blumenthal, a young man who worked in the stock exchange in New York with his trader brother, became very interested in the readings, shared Cayce’s outlook, and offered to finance the vision in the right spirit. He bought them a house at Virginia Beach.[46]

On May 6, 1927, the Association of National Investigations was incorporated in the state of Virginia. This would manage building the hospital and a scientific study of the readings. Morton was president and his brother and several others were vice presidents. Cayce was secretary and treasurer, and Gladys was assistant secretary. To protect against legal prosecution, the rules required any person requesting a reading to become a member of the Association and agree they were participating in an experiment in psychic research. Early in 1928, Moseley Brown, head of the psychology department at Washington and Lee University, became convinced of the readings and joined the Association.[47]

On October 11, 1928, the dedication ceremonies for the hospital complex were held. It contained a lecture hall, library, vault for storage of the readings, and offices for research workers. There was also a large living room, a 12-car garage, servants quarters, and a tennis court. It contained “the largest lawn, in fact the only lawn, between the Cavalier and Cape Henry”. The first patient was admitted the next day.[48]

This facility would enable consistent checking and rechecking of the remedies, which was Cayce’s goal. There were consistent remedies for many of the illnesses regardless of the patient, and Cayce hoped to produce a compendium that could be used by the medical profession. A chemist, Sunker A. Bisley, DPhil (Oxon), who also used “clairvoyant knowledge” to produce medicines, collaborated with Cayce to produce Atomidine, an absorbable form of iodine, which was perfected and sold.[49]

The basic raison d’etre for all the cures was the “assimilation of needed properties through the digestive system, from food taken into the body … [All treatments, including all schools and types of treatment, were given in order to establish] the proper equilibrium of the assimilating system.”[50] Therapies as divergent as salt packs, poultices, hot compresses, color healing, magnetism, vibrator treatment, massage, osteopathic manipulation, dental therapy, colonics, enemas, antiseptics, inhalants, homeopathics, essential oils, mud baths were prescribed. Substances used included oils, salts, herbs, iodine, witch hazel, magnesia, bismuth, alcohol, castoria, lactated pepsin, turpentine, charcoal, animated ash, soda, cream of tartar, aconite, laudanum, camphor, and gold solution. These were prescribed to overcome conditions that prevented proper digestion and assimilation of needed nutrients from the prescribed diet. The aim of the readings was to produce a healthy body, removing the cause of the specific ailment. Readings would indicate if the patient’s recovery was problematic.[51]

There was a waiting list of months ahead.[52] Blumenthal and Brown went ahead with ambitious plans for a university as a supplement to the hospital and a “parallel service for the mind and spirit”. In fact, it was to dwarf the hospital and rival other universities in respectability before psychic studies would begin. It was to open on September 22, 1930. On September 16 Blumenthal called a meeting of the Association resulting in his ownership of the hospital to curb expenses. After the first semester he ceased his support of the university, and on February 26, 1931, closed down the Association. Cayce removed the files of the readings from the hospital and took them home.[53]

The Depression years saw Cayce turn his attention to spiritual teachings. In 1931, Edgar Cayce’s friends and family asked him how they could become psychic like him. Out of this seemingly simple question came an eleven-year discourse that led to the creation of “Study Groups”. From his altered state, Cayce relayed to this group that the purpose of life is not to become psychic, but to become a more spiritually aware and loving person. Study Group No. 1 was told that they could “bring light to a waiting world” and that these lessons would still be studied a hundred years into the future. The readings were now about dreams, coincidence (synchronicity), developing intuition, the akashic records, astrology, past-life relationships, soul mates and other esoteric subjects. Hundreds of books have been published about these so called readings some never recorded after recording became available.

On June 6, 1931, 61 people attended a meeting to carry on the work and form a new organization called the Association for Research and Enlightenment. In July the new association was incorporated, and Cayce legally returned the house to Blumenthal and bought another place.[54]

Hugh Lynn proposed that they develop a stock in trade rather than something grandiose, and that they build a library of research into the phenomena and hold study groups, and that Cayce would do two readings a day. The association accepted this, and Hugh Lynn also started a monthly bulletin for association members. The bulletin contained readings on general interest subjects, interesting cases, book reviews on psychic subjects, health hints from readings, and news of psychic phenomena in other fields.[55]

Hugh Lynn narrowed the mailing list to some 300 members who were genuinely enthusiastic, and as a result the first annual congress of the association was held in June 1932. He procured speakers on various metaphysical and psychic subjects and included public readings by Cayce. Members left the conference eager to start study groups in their own localities. Records were kept of everything that went on in the readings including the attitudes and routines of Cayce. Everything was then checked with the subjects of the readings, most of whom were not present during the reading, and the data was published in a study entitled “100 cases of clairvoyance”. However, the response from scientists in general was that none of the experiments were performed under test conditions.[56] Hugh Lynn continued to build files of case histories, parallel studies in psychic phenomena, and research readings for the study groups.[57]

Association activities remained simple and un-publicized. Members raised a building fund for an office, library, and vault, which they erected in 1940–41 as a single unit added on to the Cayce residence.[58] No sign guided visitors to the centre. Association membership averaged 500 to 600. The turnover from year to year was approximately half this total. The other half remained a solid basis for the research work, an audience for case studies, pamphlets, bulletins—and the Congress bulletin, which was a yearbook and record of congress events. A mailing list of several thousand served people who remained interested in Cayce’s activities.[59]

Members were drawn from all of the Protestant churches: from the Roman, Greek, Syrian and Armenian Catholic churches; from Theosophy, Christian Science and Spiritualism; and from many Oriental religions. Cayce’s philosophy was, if it makes you a better member of your church then it’s good; if it takes you away from your church, it’s bad. The philosophy of the readings was that truth is one, each organization is part of this one, therefore the A.R.E. was not to function as a schism or in opposition to any religious organization. The goal of the work was not something new but something ancient and universal.[60]

Both sons entered the forces during the war. They both married, Hugh Lynn in 1941 and Edgar Evans in 1942.[61]

In March 1943 the first edition of the only biography written during Cayce’s lifetime, There is a River by Thomas Sugrue, was published. As a consequence, public demand increased. Office staff had to be increased, and the mailman could no longer carry all the mail so Gertrude got it from the post office by car. Hugh Lynn was away in the forces, and Cayce coped with the letters and increased his readings to four to six per day.[61]

Cayce gained national prominence in 1943 after the publication of a high-profile article in the magazine Coronet titled “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach”.[44] World War II was taking its toll on American soldiers and he felt he could not refuse the families who requested help for their loved ones who were missing in action. He increased the frequency of his readings to eight per day to try to make an impression on the ever-growing pile of requests. He said this took a toll on his health as it was emotionally draining and often fatigued him. The readings themselves scolded him for attempting too much and that he should limit his workload to just two life readings a day or else these good efforts would eventually kill him.[62]

From June 1943 to June 1944, 1,385 readings were taken. By August 1944 Cayce collapsed from strain. When he gave a reading on this situation, the instructions were to rest until he was well or dead. He and Gertrude went away to the mountains of Virginia, but in September Edgar Cayce suffered a stroke at the age of 67, in September 1944, and died on January 3, 1945.[63] He is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.[64] Gertrude died three months later.[65]

The Association continued the work of classifying and cross-referencing the over 14,000 files of readings that had been taken throughout Cayce’s lifetime from March 31, 1901, to September 17, 1944. The results of these have been disseminated through the Association’s publications with the members as the recipients of this material.[66]

Claimed clairvoyant abilities

Until September 1923, his readings were not systematically recorded or preserved. However, an article published in the Birmingham Post-Herald on October 10, 1922, quotes Cayce as saying that he had given 8,056 readings as of that date and it is known that he gave approximately 13,000–14,000 readings after that date. A total of 14,306 are available at the A.R.E. Cayce headquarters in Virginia Beach and on an online, member-only section along with background information, correspondence, and follow-up documentation.[67]

Other abilities that have been attributed to Cayce include astral projection, prophesying, mediumship, viewing the Akashic records or “Book of Life”, and seeing auras. Cayce said he became interested in learning more about these subjects after he was informed about the content of his readings, which he reported that he never actually heard himself.[68]

Supporters

Cayce’s clients included a number of famous people such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin.[69]

Gina Cerminara published books such as Many Mansions and The World Within. Brian Weiss published a bestseller regarding clinical recollection of past lives, Many Lives, Many Masters. These books provide broad support for spiritualism and reincarnation. Many Mansions elaborates on Cayce’s work and supports his stated abilities with real life examples.

In 1971 Edgar Cayce’s sons Edgar Evans Cayce and Hugh Lynn Cayce published a book titled The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce’s Power,[70] claiming Cayce’s readings had an approximate 85% success rate. The majority of the book investigated cases where Cayce’s readings were demonstrably incorrect.

Controversy

Cayce advocated pseudohistorical ideas in his trance readings such as the existence of Atlantis and the discredited theory of polygenism.[75] In many trance sessions, he re-interpreted the history of life on earth. One of Cayce’s controversial claims was that of polygenism. According to Cayce, five human races (white, black, red, brown, and yellow) had been created separately but simultaneously on different parts of the Earth.[75] Cayce also accepted the existence of aliens and Atlantis, and claimed that “the red race developed in Atlantis and its development was rapid.” Another claim by Cayce was that “soul-entities” on Earth intermingled with animals to produce “things” such as giants that were as much as twelve feet tall.[75]

In his 2003 book The Skeptic’s Dictionary, philosopher and skeptic Robert Todd Carroll wrote, “Cayce is one of the main people responsible for some of the sillier notions about Atlantis.”[76] Carroll mentioned some of Cayce’s discredited ideas, including his belief in a giant solar crystal, activated by the sun, and used to harness energy and provide power on Atlantis, and his prediction that in 1958, the United States would rediscover a death ray that had been used on Atlantis.[76]

In the 1930s, Cayce incorrectly predicted that North America would experience chaos: “Los Angeles, San Francisco… will be among those that will be destroyed before New York”.[77] Cayce also incorrectly predicted the Second Coming of Christ in 1998.[78]

Criticism

Skeptics say that Cayce’s alleged psychic abilities were fakery or nonexistent.[79][80][81] Medical health experts are critical of Cayce’s unorthodox treatments, which they regard as quackery such as his promotion of pseudoscientific dieting ideas and use of homeopathic remedies.[82][83]

Science writers and skeptics have pointed out that the evidence for Cayce’s alleged clairvoyant powers comes from sensationalized newspaper articles, affidavits, anecdotes, testimonials, and books rather than any empirical evidence that can be independently evaluated. Martin Gardner, for example, wrote that all of the “verified” claims and descriptions from Cayce’s trances can be traced to ideas found in the books that Cayce had been reading by authors such as Carl Jung, P. D. Ouspensky, and Helena Blavatsky. Gardner concluded that the trance readings of Cayce contain, “little bits of information gleaned from here and there in the occult literature, spiced with occasional novelties from Cayce’s unconscious”.[84]

Magician James Randi commented that “Cayce was fond of expressions like ‘I feel that’ and ‘perhaps’—qualifying words used to avoid positive declarations.”[86]

Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment has been criticized for promoting pseudoscience.[81]

Helena Blavatsky

In this Eastern Slavic naming convention, the patronymic is Petrovna and the family name is Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.jpg

Blavatsky in 1877

Born      Yelena Petrovna von Hahn

12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831

Died       8 May 1891 (aged 59)

London, United Kingdom

Era         19th-century philosophy

School   Theosophy

Notable ideas     Causeless cause, Itchasakti, triple manifestation

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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Russian: Елена Петровна Блаватская, Yelena Petrovna Blavatskaya, often known as Madame Blavatsky; née von Hahn; Ukrainian: Олена Петрівна Блаватська, Olena Petrivna Blavatska; 12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831 – 8 May 1891) was a Russian author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.

Born into an aristocratic family of mixed Russian-German descent in Yekaterinoslav, then in the Russian Empire (now Dnipro in Ukraine), Blavatsky traveled widely around the empire as a child. Largely self-educated, she developed an interest in Western esotericism during her teenage years. According to her later claims, in 1849 she embarked on a series of world travels, visiting Europe, the Americas, and India. She also claimed that during this period she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the “Masters of the Ancient Wisdom”, who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science. Both contemporary critics and later biographers have argued that some or all of these foreign visits were fictitious, and that she spent this period in Europe. By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead. Relocating to the United States in 1873, she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and rose to public attention as a spirit medium, attention that included public accusations of fraudulence.

In 1875 New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with Olcott and William Quan Judge. In 1877, she published Isis Unveiled, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view. Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as “the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy”, proclaiming that it was reviving an “Ancient Wisdom” which underlay all the world’s religions. In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. That same year, while in Ceylon, she and Olcott became the first people from the United States to formally convert to Buddhism.[citation needed] Although opposed by the British colonial administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena. Amid ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, there establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London. Here she published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she claimed were ancient Tibetan manuscripts, as well as two further books, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence. She died of influenza.

Blavatsky was a controversial figure during her lifetime, championed by supporters as an enlightened Sage and derided as a charlatan by critics. Her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents like Ariosophy, Anthroposophy, and the New Age Movement.

Early life

Developing a reliable account of Blavatsky’s life has proved difficult for biographers because in later life she deliberately provided contradictory accounts and falsifications about her own past.[4] Furthermore, very few of her own writings written before 1873 survive, meaning that biographers must rely heavily on these unreliable later accounts.[5] The accounts of her early life provided by her family members have also been considered dubious by biographers.[6]

Childhood: 1831–1849

Birth and family background

An illustration of Yekaterinoslav—Blavatsky’s birthplace—as it appeared in the early 19th century

Blavatsky was born as Helena Petrovna von Hahn in the town of Yekaterinoslav, then part of the Russian Empire.[7] Her birth date was 12 August 1831, although according to the Julian calendar used in 19th-century Russia it was 31 July.[8] Immediately after her birth, she was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.[9] At the time, Yekaterinoslav was undergoing a cholera epidemic, and her mother contracted the disease shortly after childbirth; despite the expectations of their doctor, both mother and child survived the epidemic.[10]

Blavatsky’s family was aristocratic.[11] Her mother was Helena Andreyevna von Hahn (Russian: Елена Андреевна Ган, 1814–1842; née Fadeyeva), a self-educated 17-year-old who was the daughter of Princess Yelena Pavlovna Dolgorukaya, a similarly self-educated aristocrat.[12] Blavatsky’s father was Pyotr Alexeyevich von Hahn (Russian: Пётр Алексеевич Ган, 1798–1873), a descendant of the German von Hahn aristocratic family, who served as a captain in the Russian Royal Horse Artillery, and would later rise to the rank of colonel.[13] Pyotr had not been present at his daughter’s birth, having been in Poland fighting to suppress the November Uprising against Russian rule, and first saw her when she was six months old.[14] As well as her Russian and German ancestry, Blavatsky could also claim French heritage, for a great-great grandfather had been a French Huguenot nobleman who had fled to Russia to escape persecution, there serving in the court of Catherine the Great.[15]

As a result of Pyotr’s career, the family frequently moved to different parts of the Empire, accompanied by their servants,[16] a mobile childhood that may have influenced Blavatsky’s largely nomadic lifestyle in later life.[17] A year after Pyotr’s arrival in Yekaterinoslav, the family relocated to the nearby army town of Romankovo.[18] When Blavatsky was two years old, her younger brother, Sasha, died in another army town when no medical help could be found.[19] In 1835, mother and daughter moved to Odessa, where Blavatsky’s maternal grandfather Andrei Fadeyev, a civil administrator for the imperial authorities, had recently been posted. It was in this city that Blavatsky’s sister Vera Petrovna was born.[20]

St. Petersburg, Poltava, and Saratov

After a return to rural Ukraine, Pyotr was posted to Saint Petersburg, where the family moved in 1836. Blavatsky’s mother liked the city, there establishing her own literary career, penning novels under the pseudonym of “Zenaida R-va” and translating the works of the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton for Russian publication.[21] When Pyotr returned to Ukraine circa 1837, she remained in the city.[22] After Fadeyev was assigned to become a trustee for the Kalmyk people of Central Asia, Blavatsky and her mother accompanied him to Astrakhan, where they befriended a Kalmyk leader, Tumen.[23] The Kalmyks were practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, and it was here that Blavatsky gained her first experience with the religion.[24]

A painting of Blavatsky and her mother, titled “Two Helens (Helena Hahn and Helena Blavatsky)” 1844–1845

In 1838, Blavatsky’s mother moved with her daughters to be with her husband at Poltava, where she taught Blavatsky how to play the piano and organised for her to take dance lessons.[25] As a result of her poor health, Blavatsky’s mother returned to Odessa, where Blavatsky learned English from a British governess.[26] They next moved to Saratov, where a brother, Leonid, was born in June 1840.[27] The family proceeded to Poland and then back to Odessa, where Blavatsky’s mother died of tuberculosis in June 1842, aged 28.[28]

The three surviving children were sent to live with their maternal grandparents in Saratov, where their grandfather Andrei had been appointed Governor of Saratov Governorate.[29] The historian Richard Davenport-Hines described the young Blavatsky as “a petted, wayward, invalid child” who was a “beguiling story-teller”.[30] Accounts provided by relatives reveal that she socialized largely with lower-class children and that she enjoyed playing pranks and reading.[31] She was educated in French, art, and music, all subjects designed to enable her to find a husband.[32] With her grandparents she holidayed in Tumen’s Kalmyk summer camp, where she learned horse riding and some Tibetan.[33]

She later claimed that in Saratov she discovered the personal library of her maternal great-grandfather, Prince Pavel Vasilevich Dolgorukov (d. 1838); it contained a variety of books on esoteric subjects, encouraging her burgeoning interest in it.[34] Dolgorukov had been initiated into Freemasonry in the late 1770s and had belonged to the Rite of Strict Observance; there were rumors that he had met both Alessandro Cagliostro and the Count of St. Germain.[35] She also later stated that at this time of life she began to experience visions in which she encountered a “Mysterious Indian” man, and that in later life she would meet this man in the flesh.[36] Many biographers have considered this to be the first appearance of the “Masters” in her life story.[37]

According to some of her later accounts, in 1844–45 Blavatsky was taken by her father to England, where she visited London and Bath.[38] According to this story, in London she received piano lessons from the Bohemian composer Ignaz Moscheles, and performed with Clara Schumann.[39] However, some Blavatsky biographers believe that this visit to Britain never took place, particularly as no mention of it is made in her sister’s memoirs.[40] After a year spent living with her aunt, Yekaterina Andreyevna Witte,[41] she moved to Tiflis, Georgia, where grandfather Andrei had been appointed director of state lands in Transcaucasia.[42] Blavatsky claimed that here she established a friendship with Alexander Vladimirovich Golitsyn, a Russian Freemason and member of the Golitsyn family who encouraged her interest in esoteric matters.[43] She would also claim that at this period she had further paranormal experiences, astral traveling and again encountering her “mysterious Indian” in visions.[44]

World travels: 1849–1869

Blavatsky’s drawing of a boat scene, produced in England in 1851[45]

At age 17, she agreed to marry Nikifor Vladimirovich Blavatsky, a man in his forties who worked as Vice Governor of Erivan Province. Her reasons for doing so were unclear, although she later claimed that she was attracted by his belief in magic.[46] Although she tried to back out shortly before the wedding ceremony, the marriage took place on 7 July 1849.[47] Moving with him to the Sardar Palace, she made repeated unsuccessful attempts to escape and return to her family in Tiflis, to which he eventually relented.[48] The family sent her, accompanied by a servant and maid, to Odessa to meet her father, who planned to return to Saint Petersburg with her. The escorts accompanied her to Poti and then Kerch, intending to continue with her to Odessa. Blavatsky claimed that, fleeing her escorts and bribing the captain of the ship that had taken her to Kerch, she reached Constantinople.[49] This marked the start of nine years spent traveling the world, possibly financed by her father.[50]

She did not keep a diary at the time, and was not accompanied by relatives who could verify her activities.[51] Thus, historian of esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke noted that public knowledge of these travels rests upon “her own largely uncorroborated accounts”, which are marred by being “occasionally conflicting in their chronology”.[52] For religious studies scholar Bruce F. Campbell, there was “no reliable account” for the next 25 years of her life.[53] According to biographer Peter Washington, at this point “myth and reality begin to merge seamlessly in Blavatsky’s biography”.[54]

She later claimed that in Constantinople she developed a friendship with a Hungarian opera singer named Agardi Metrovitch, whom she first encountered when saving him from being murdered.[55] It was also in Constantinople that she met the Countess Sofia Kiselyova, who she would accompany on a tour of Egypt, Greece, and Eastern Europe.[56] In Cairo, she met the American art student Albert Rawson, who later wrote extensively about the Middle East,[57] and together they allegedly visited a Coptic magician, Paulos Metamon.[58] In 1851, she proceeded to Paris, where she encountered the Mesmerist Victor Michal, who impressed her.[59] From there, she visited England, and would claim that it was here that she met the “mysterious Indian” who had appeared in her childhood visions, a Hindu whom she referred to as the Master Morya. While she provided various conflicting accounts of how they met, locating it in both London and Ramsgate according to separate stories, she maintained that he claimed that he had a special mission for her, and that she must travel to Tibet.[60]

She made her way to Asia via the Americas, heading to Canada in autumn 1851. Inspired by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, she sought out the Native American communities of Quebec in the hope of meeting their magico-religious specialists, but was instead robbed, later attributing these Natives’ behavior to the corrupting influence of Christian missionaries.[61] She then headed south, visiting New Orleans, Texas, Mexico, and the Andes, before transport via ship from the West Indies to Ceylon and then Bombay.[62] She spent two years in India, allegedly following the instructions found in letters that Morya had sent to her.[63] She attempted to enter Tibet, but was prevented from doing so by the British colonial administration.[64]

She later claimed that she then headed back to Europe by ship, surviving a shipwreck near to the Cape of Good Hope before arriving in England in 1854, where she faced hostility as a Russian citizen due to the ongoing Crimean War between Britain and Russia.[65] It was here, she claimed, that she worked as a concert musician for the Royal Philharmonic Society.[66] Sailing to the U.S., she visited New York City, where she met up with Rawson, before touring Chicago, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco, and then sailing back to India via Japan.[67] There, she spent time in Kashmir, Ladakh, and Burma, before making a second attempt to enter Tibet.[68] She claimed that this time she was successful, entering Tibet in 1856 through Kashmir, accompanied by a Tartar shaman who was attempting to reach Siberia and who thought that as a Russian citizen, Blavatsky would be able to aid him in doing so.[69] According to this account, they reached Leh before becoming lost, eventually joining a traveling Tartar group before she headed back to India.[70] She returned to Europe via Madras and Java.[71]

After spending time in France and Germany, in 1858 she returned to her family, then based in Pskov.[72] She later claimed that there she began to exhibit further paranormal abilities, with rapping and creaking accompanying her around the house and furniture moving of its own volition.[73] In 1860, she and her sister visited their maternal grandmother in Tiflis. It was there that she met up with Metrovitch, and where she reconciled with Nikifor in 1862.[74] Together they adopted a child named Yuri, who would die aged five in 1867, when he was buried under Metrovitch’s surname.[75] In 1864, while riding in Mingrelia, Blavatsky fell from her horse and was in a coma for several months with a spinal fracture. Recovering in Tiflis, she claimed that upon awaking she gained full control of her paranormal abilities.[76][77] She then proceeded to Italy, Transylvania, and Serbia, possibly studying the Cabalah with a rabbi at this point.[78] In 1867, she proceeded to the Balkans, Hungary, and then Italy, where she spent time in Venice, Florence, and Mentana, claiming that in the latter she had been injured fighting for Giuseppe Garibaldi at the Battle of Mentana.[79]

Many critics and biographers have expressed doubt about the veracity of Blavatsky’s claims regarding her visits to Tibet, which rely entirely on her own claims, lacking any credible independent testimony.[86] It has been highlighted that during the nineteenth century, Tibet was closed to Europeans, and visitors faced the perils of bandits and a harsh terrain; the latter would have been even more problematic if Blavatsky had been as stout and unathletic as she would be in later life.[87] However, as several biographers have noted, traders and pilgrims from neighboring lands were able to access Tibet freely, suggesting the possibility that she would have been allowed to enter accompanied by Morya, particularly if she had been mistaken for an Asian.[88] Blavatsky’s eyewitness account of Shigatse was unprecedented in the West,[84] and one scholar of Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, suggested that she later exhibited an advanced knowledge of Mahayana Buddhism consistent with her having studied in a Tibetan monastery.[89] Lachman noted that had Blavatsky spent time in Tibet, then she would be “one of the greatest travelers of the nineteenth century”,[90] although he added – “in all honesty I do not know” if Blavatsky spent time in Tibet or not.[91] Conversely, biographer Marion Meade commented on Blavatsky’s tales of Tibet and various other adventures by stating that “hardly a word of this appears to be true”.[92]

Later life

Embracing Spiritualism and establishing Theosophy: 1870–1878

Arriving in New York City

Blavatsky

Blavatsky alleged that she departed Tibet with the mission of proving to the world that the phenomena identified by Spiritualists were objectively real, thus defending Spiritualism against accusations of fraud. However, she also stated that the entities being contacted by Spiritualist mediums were not the spirits of the dead, as the Spiritualist movement typically alleged, but instead either mischievous elementals or the “shells” left behind by the deceased.[93] She proceeded via the Suez Canal to Greece, where she met with another of the Masters, Master Hilarion.[94] She set sail for Egypt aboard the SS Eumonia, but in July 1871 it exploded during the journey; Blavatsky was one of only 16 survivors.[95] Reaching Cairo, she met up with Metamon, and with the help of a woman named Emma Cutting established a société spirite, which was based largely on Spiritism, a form of Spiritualism founded by Allan Kardec which professed a belief in reincarnation, in contrast to the mainstream Spiritualist movement.[96] However, Blavatsky believed that Cutting and many of the mediums employed by the society were fraudulent, and she closed it down after two weeks.[97] In Cairo, she also met with the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, and another of the Masters, Serapis Bey.[98] It was also here that she met up with Metrovitch, although he soon died of typhoid, with Blavatsky claiming to have overseen the funeral.[99]

Leaving Egypt, she proceeded to Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, there encountering members of the Druze religion.[100] It was during these travels that she met with the writer and traveler Lidia Pashkova, who provided independent verification of Blavatsky’s travels during this period.[101] In July 1872 she returned to her family in Odessa, before departing in April 1873.[102] She spent time in Bucharest and Paris,[103] before – according to her later claims – Morya instructed her to go to the United States. Blavatsky arrived in New York City on 8 July 1873.[104][105] There, she moved into a women’s housing cooperative on Madison Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, earning a wage through piece work sewing and designing advertising cards.[106] It was here that she attracted attention, and was interviewed by the journalist Anna Ballard of the New York newspaper The Sun; this interview was the earliest textual source in which Blavatsky claimed to have spent time in Tibet.[107] Indeed, it was while in New York that “detailed records” of Blavatsky’s life again become available to historians.[108] Soon after, Blavatsky received news of her father’s death, thus inheriting a considerable fortune, allowing her to move into a lavish hotel.[109] In December 1874, Blavatsky met the Georgian Mikheil Betaneli. Infatuated with her, he repeatedly requested that they marry, to which she ultimately relented; this constituted bigamy, as her first husband was still alive. However, as she refused to consummate the marriage, Betaneli sued for divorce and returned to Georgia.[110]

Meeting Henry Steel Olcott and the foundation of the Theosophical Society

Blavatsky was intrigued by a news story about William and Horatio Eddy, brothers based in Chittenden, Vermont, who it was claimed could levitate and manifest spiritual phenomena. She visited Chittenden in October 1874, there meeting the reporter Henry Steel Olcott, who was investigating the brothers’ claims for the Daily Graphic.[111] Claiming that Blavatsky impressed him with her own ability to manifest spirit phenomena, Olcott authored a newspaper article on her.[112] They soon became close friends, giving each other the nicknames of “Maloney” (Olcott) and “Jack” (Blavatsky).[113] He helped attract greater attention to Blavatsky’s claims, encouraging the Daily Graphics editor to publish an interview with her,[114] and discussing her in his book on Spiritualism, People from the Other World (1875),[115] which her Russian correspondent Alexandr Aksakov urged her to translate into Russian.[116] She began to instruct Olcott in her own occult beliefs, and encouraged by her he became celibate, tee-totaling, and vegetarian, although she herself was unable to commit to the latter.[117] In January 1875 the duo visited the Spiritualist mediums Nelson and Jennie Owen in Philadelphia; the Owens asked Olcott to test them to prove that the phenomena that they produced were not fraudulent, and while Olcott believed them, Blavatsky opined that they faked some of their phenomena in those instances when genuine phenomena failed to manifest.[118]

Blavatsky, c. 1877

Drumming up interest for their ideas, Blavatsky and Olcott published a circular letter in Eldridge Gerry Brown’s Boston-based Spiritualist publication, The Spiritual Scientist.[119] There, they named themselves the “Brotherhood of Luxor”, a name potentially inspired by the pre-existing Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.[120] They began living together in a series of rented apartments in New York City, which they decorated with taxidermied animals and images of spiritual figures; their life was funded largely by Olcott’s continued work as a lawyer.[121] Their last such apartment came to be known as the Lamasery.[122] Allegedly encouraged by the Masters, Blavatsky and Olcott established the Miracle Club, through which they facilitated lectures on esoteric themes in New York City.[123] It was through this group that they met an Irish Spiritualist, William Quan Judge, who shared many of their interests.[124]

At a Miracle Club meeting on 7 September 1875, Blavatsky, Olcott, and Judge agreed to establish an esoteric organisation, with Charles Sotheran suggesting that they call it the Theosophical Society.[125] The term theosophy came from the Greek theos (“god(s)”) and sophia (“wisdom”), thus meaning “god-wisdom” or “divine wisdom”.[126] The term was not new, but had been previously used in various contexts by the Philaletheians and the Christian mystic Jakob Böhme.[127] Theosophists would often argue over how to define Theosophy, with Judge expressing the view that the task was impossible.[126] Blavatsky however insisted that Theosophy was not a religion in itself.[128] Lachman has described the movement as “a very wide umbrella, under which quite a few things could find a place”.[129] On foundation, Olcott was appointed chairman, with Judge as secretary, and Blavatsky as corresponding secretary, although she remained the group’s primary theoretician and leading figure.[130] Prominent early members included Emma Hardinge Britten, Signor Bruzzesi, C.C. Massey, and William L. Alden; many were prominent and successful members of the establishment, although not all would remain members for long.[131]

Isis Unveiled

The underlying theme among these diverse topics [in Isis Unveiled] is the existence of an ancient wisdom-religion, an ageless occult guide to the cosmos, nature and human life. The many faiths of man are said to derive from a universal religion known to both Plato and the ancient Hindu sages. The wisdom-religion is also identified with Hermetic philosophy as “the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology” (I, vii). Every religion is based on the same truth or “secret doctrine”, which contains “the alpha and omega of universal science” (I, 511). This ancient wisdom-religion will become the religion of the future (I, 613).

—Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2004.[132]

In 1875, Blavatsky began work on a book outlining her Theosophical worldview, much of which would be written during a stay in the Ithaca home of Hiram Corson, a Professor of English Literature at Cornell University. Although she had hoped to call it The Veil of Isis, it would be published as Isis Unveiled.[133] While writing it, Blavatsky claimed to be aware of a second consciousness within her body, referring to it as “the lodger who is in me”, and stating that it was this second consciousness that inspired much of the writing.[134] In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky quoted extensively from other esoteric and religious texts, although her contemporary and colleague Olcott always maintained that she had quoted from books that she did not have access to.[135] Writing more than a century after her death Lachman conjectured that if this had been the case, then she had had an eidetic memory,[136] such that, while relying on earlier sources, the book represented an original synthesis that connected disparate ideas not brought together before.[137]

Cover of ‘Blavatsky Unveiled’, the first translation of Isis Unveiled into modern English.

Revolving around Blavatsky’s idea that all the world’s religions stemmed from a single “Ancient Wisdom”, which she connected to the Western esotericism of ancient Hermeticism and Neoplatonism,[138] it also articulated her thoughts on Spiritualism,[139] and provided a criticism of Darwinian evolution, stating that it dealt only with the physical world and ignored the spiritual realms.[140] The book was edited by Professor of Philosophy Alexander Wilder and published in two volumes by J.W. Bouton in 1877.[141] Although facing negative mainstream press reviews, including from those who highlighted that it extensively quoted around 100 other books without acknowledgement,[142] it proved to be such a commercial success, with its initial print run of 1,000 copies selling out in a week,[143] that the publisher requested a sequel, although Blavatsky turned down the offer.[137] While Isis Unveiled was a success, the Society remained largely inactive,[144] having fallen into this state in autumn 1876.[145] This was despite the fact that new lodges of the organisation had been established throughout the U.S. and in London, and prominent figures like Thomas Edison and Abner Doubleday had joined.[146] In July 1878, Blavatsky gained U.S. citizenship.[147]

India: 1879–1885

The Theosophical Society established links with an Indian Hindu reform movement, the Arya Samaj, which had been founded by the Swami Dayananda Saraswati; Blavatsky and Olcott believed that the two organisations shared a common spiritual world-view.[148] Unhappy with life in the U.S., Blavatsky decided to move to India, with Olcott agreeing to join her, securing work as a U.S. trade representative to the country.[149] In December, the duo auctioned off many of their possessions, although Edison gifted them a phonograph to take with them to India.[150] They left New York City aboard the Canada, which took them to London. After meeting with well-wishers in the capital, they traveled to Liverpool, there setting sail aboard the Speke Hall, arriving in Bombay in February 1879.[151] In the city, they were greeted with celebrations organised by Arya Samaj member Hurrychund Chintamon before obtaining a house in Girgaum Road, part of Bombay’s native area.[152]

Associating largely with Indians rather than the governing British elite, Blavatsky took a fifteen-year-old Gujarati boy, Vallah “Babula” Bulla, as her personal servant.[153] Many educated Indians were impressed with the Theosophists championing of Indian religions, coming about during a period “of [India’s] growing self-assertion against the values and beliefs” of the British Empire.[154] Her activity in the city was monitored by British intelligence services, who suspected that she was working for Russia.[155] In April, Blavatsky took Olcott, Babula, and their friend Moolji Thackersey to the Karla Caves, announcing that they contained secret passages that led to an underground place where the Masters assembled.[156] Then claiming that the Masters were telepathically commanding her to head to Rajputana in the Punjab, she and Olcott headed north.[157] At the Yamuna river, they met the sannyasin Babu Surdass, who had sat in the lotus position for 52 years, and in Agra saw the Taj Mahal.[158] In Saharanpur they met with Dayananda and his Arya Samajists, before returning to Bombay.[159]

Blavatsky and Hindu Theosophists in India, circa 1884

In July 1879, Blavatsky and Olcott began work on a monthly magazine, The Theosophist, with the first issue coming out in October.[160] The magazine soon obtained a large readership, with the management being taken over by Damodar K. Mavalankar, a Theosophist who introduced the idea of referring to the Masters as mahatmas.[161] In December, Blavatsky and Olcott travelled to Allahabad, there visiting Alfred Percy Sinnett, the editor of The Pioneer and keen Spiritualist. A.O. Hume was also a guest at the Sinnett’s home, and Blavatsky was encouraged to manifest paranormal phenomena in their presence.[162] From there, they travelled to Benares, where they stayed at the palace of the Maharaja of Vizianagram.[163] Blavatsky and Olcott were then invited to Ceylon by Buddhist monks. There they officially converted to Buddhism—apparently the first from the United States to do so[164]—taking the Five Precepts in a ceremony at Ramayana Nikayana in May 1880.[165] Touring the island, they were met by crowds intrigued by these unusual Westerners who embraced Buddhism rather than proselytizing Christianity. Their message proved a boost to Sinhalese nationalist self-esteem, and they were invited to see the Buddha’s Tooth in Kandy.[166]

Upon learning that old comrade Emma Coulomb (née Cutting) and her husband had fallen into poverty in Ceylon, Blavatsky invited them to move into her home in Bombay.[167] However, the Coulombs annoyed Rosa Bates and Edward Winbridge, two American Theosophists who were also living with Blavatsky; when Blavatsky took the side of the Coulombs, Bates and Winbridge returned to the U.S.[168] Blavatsky was then invited to Simla to spend more time with Sinnett, and there performed a range of materializations that astounded the other guests; in one instance, she allegedly made a cup-and-saucer materialize under the soil during a picnic.[169] Sinnett was eager to contact the Masters himself, convincing Blavatsky to facilitate this communication, resulting in the production of over 1400 pages allegedly authored by Koot Hoomi and Morya, which came to be known as the Mahatma Letters.[170] Sinnett summarised the teachings contained in these letters in his book Esoteric Buddhism (1883), although scholars of Buddhism like Max Müller publicly highlighted that the contents were not Buddhist, and Blavatsky herself disliked the misleading title.[171] Since the book’s publication, there has been much debate as to the authenticity of the letters, with some arguing that they were written by Blavatsky herself, and others believing that they were written by separate individuals.[172][173] According to Meade, “there can be no reasonable doubt that Helena was their author”.[174]

Theosophy was unpopular with both Christian missionaries and the British colonial administration,[175] with India’s English-language press being almost uniformly negative toward the Society.[176] The group nevertheless proved popular, and branches were established across the country.[177] While Blavatsky had emphasized its growth among the native Indian population rather than among the British elite, she moved into a comfortable bungalow in the elite Bombay suburb of Breach Candy, which she said was more accessible to Western visitors.[178] Olcott had decided to establish the Buddhist Education Fund to combat the spread of the Christian faith in Ceylon and encourage pride and interest in Buddhism among the island’s Sinhalese population. Although Blavatsky initially opposed the idea, stating that the Masters would not approve, Olcott’s project proved a success, and she changed her opinion about it.[179]

Blavatsky standing behind Olcott (middle seated) and Damodar Mavalankar (seated to his left), Bombay, 1881

Blavatsky had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease and hoping the weather to be more conducive to her condition she took up the offer of the Society’s Madras Branch to move to their city.[180] However, in November 1882 the Society purchased an estate in Adyar, which became their permanent headquarters; a few rooms were set aside for Blavatsky, who moved into them in December.[181] She continued to tour the subcontinent, claiming that she then spent time in Sikkim and Tibet, where she visited her teacher’s ashram for several days.[182] With her health deteriorating, she agreed to accompany Olcott on his trip to Britain, where he was planning to argue the case for Ceylonese Buddhism and sort out problems with the Society’s London Lodge.[183][184]

Sailing to Marseilles, France, in March 1883, she spent time in Nice with the founder of the Theosophical Society’s French branch, the Countess of Caithness (widow of James Sinclair, 14th Earl of Caithness), with whom she continued to Paris.[185][186] In London, she appeared at the lodge’s meeting, where she sought to quell arguments between Sinnett on the one hand and Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland on the other.[187] Unsatisfied, Kingsford – whom Blavatsky thought “an unbearable snobbish woman” – split from the Theosophical Society to form the Hermetic Society.[188] In London, Blavatsky made contact with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) through Frederic W. H. Myers. She complied with their request to undertake a study of her and the paranormal abilities that she claimed to possess, although wasn’t impressed by the organisation and mockingly referred to it as the “Spookical Research Society”.[189]

With Blavatsky in Europe, trouble broke out at the society’s Adyar headquarters in what became known as the Coulomb Affair. The society’s Board of Control had accused Emma Coulomb of misappropriating their funds for her own purposes, and asked her to leave their center. She and her husband refused, blackmailing the society with letters that they claimed were written by Blavatsky and which proved that her paranormal abilities were fraudulent. The society refused to pay them and expelled them from their premises, at which the couple turned to the Madras-based Christian College Magazine, who published an exposé of Blavatsky’s alleged fraudulence using the Coulomb’s claims as a basis. The story attracted international attention and was picked up by London-based newspaper, The Times.[190] In response, in November 1884 Blavatsky headed to Cairo, where she and Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater searched for negative information on Emma Coulomb, discovering stories of her alleged former history of extortion and criminality.[191][192] Internally, the Society was greatly damaged by the Coulomb Affair,[193] although it remained popular in India, as did Blavatsky herself.[194]

Final years in Europe: 1885–1891

Mme. Blavatsky (painted by Hermann Schmiechen)

Worsening health led Blavatsky to contemplate a return to the milder climate of Europe, and resigning her position as corresponding secretary of the society, she left India in March 1885.[195] By 1885, the Theosophical Society had experienced rapid growth, with 121 lodges having been chartered across the world, 106 of which were located in India, Burma, and Ceylon.[196] Initially, each lodge was chartered directly from the Adyar headquarters, with members making democratic decisions by vote.[196] However, over the coming years the lodges were organised into national units with their own ruling councils, resulting in tensions between the different levels of administration.[196]

Settling in Naples, Italy, in April 1885, she began living off of a small Society pension and continued working on her next book, The Secret Doctrine.[197] She then moved to Würzburg in the Kingdom of Bavaria, where she was visited by a Swedish Theosophist, the Countess Constance Wachtmeister, who became her constant companion throughout the rest of her life.[198] In December 1885, the SPR published their report on Blavatsky and her alleged phenomena, authored by Richard Hodgson. In his report, Hodgson accused Blavatsky of being a spy for the Russian government, further accusing her of faking paranormal phenomena, largely on the basis of the Coulomb’s claims.[199] The report caused much tension within the Society, with a number of Blavatsky’s followers – among them Babaji and Subba Row – denouncing her and resigning from the organisation on the basis of it.[200]

For our own part, we regard [Blavatsky] neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.

—The statement of the Society for Psychical Research on the basis of the Hodgson Report.[201]

Blavatsky wanted to sue her accusers, although Olcott advised against it, believing that the surrounding publicity would damage the Society.[202] In private letters, Blavatsky expressed relief that the criticism was focused on her and that the identity of the Masters had not been publicly exposed.[203] For decades after, Theosophists criticized Hodgson’s methodology, arguing that he set out to disprove and attack Blavatsky rather than conduct an unbiased analysis of her claims and abilities. In 1986 the SPR admitted this to be the case and retracted the findings of the report.[204][205] However, Johnson has commented “Theosophists have overinterpreted this as complete vindication, when in fact many questions raised by Hodgson remain unanswered.”[206]

In 1886, by which time she was using a wheelchair, Blavatsky moved to Ostend in Belgium, where she was visited by Theosophists from across Europe.[207] Supplementing her pension, she established a small ink-producing business.[208] She received messages from members of the Society’s London Lodge who were dissatisfied with Sinnett’s running of it; they believed that he was focusing on attaining upper-class support rather than encouraging the promotion of Theosophy throughout society, a criticism Blavatsky agreed with.[209] She arrived in London in May 1887, initially staying in the Upper Norwood home of Theosophist Mabel Collins.[210] In September, she moved into the Holland Park home of fellow Theosophists, Bertram Keightley and his nephew Archibald Keightley.[211]

Blavatsky and Olcott in 1888

In London, she established the Blavatsky Lodge as a rival to that run by Sinnett, draining much of its membership.[212] Lodge meetings were held at the Keightels’ house on Thursday nights, with Blavatsky also greeting many visitors there, among them the occultist and poet W. B. Yeats.[213] In November 1889 she was visited by the Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi, who was studying the Bhagavad Gita with the Keightels. He became an associate member of Blavatsky’s Lodge in March 1891, and would emphasize the close connection between Theosophy and Hinduism throughout his life.[214] In 1888, Blavatsky established the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, a group under her complete control for which admittance was restricted to those who had passed certain tests. She identified it as a place for “true Theosophists” who would focus on the system’s philosophy rather than experiment with producing paranormal phenomena.[215]

In London, Blavatsky founded a magazine, controversially titling it Lucifer; in this Theosophical publication she sought to completely ignore claims regarding paranormal phenomena, and focus instead on a discussion of philosophical ideas.[216] Blavatsky also finished writing The Secret Doctrine, which was then edited by the Keightels.[217] As a commercial publisher willing to publish the approximately 1,500 page work could not be found, Blavatsky established the Theosophical Publishing Company, who brought out the work in two volumes, the first published in October 1888 and the second in January 1889.[218] Blavatsky claimed that the book constituted her commentary on the Book of Dzyan, a religious text written in Senzar which she had been taught while studying in Tibet.[219] Buddhologist David Reigle claimed that he identified Books of Kiu-te, including Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan as a first volume, as the Tantra section of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.[220] However, most scholars of Buddhism to have examined The Secret Doctrine have concluded that there was no such text as the Book of Dzyan, and that instead it was the fictional creation of Blavatsky’s.[221] In the book, Blavatsky outlined her own cosmogonical ideas about how the universe, the planets, and the human species came to exist. She also discussed her views about the human being and their soul, thus dealing with issues surrounding an afterlife.[222] The two-volume book was reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette by the social reformer Annie Besant; impressed by it, Besant met with Blavatsky and joined the Theosophists.[223] In August 1890, Blavatsky moved in to Besant’s large house at 19 Avenue Road in St. John’s Wood.[224]

Woking Crematorium in 2018

She appointed Besant to be the new head of the Blavatsky Lodge,[225] and in July 1890 inaugurated the new European headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Besant’s house.[226] There, she authored a book containing questions and corresponding answers, The Key to Theosophy.[227] This was followed by The Voice of the Silence, a short devotional text which she claimed was based on a Senzar text known as The Book of the Golden Precepts. As with The Secret Doctrine, most scholars of Buddhism have doubted that this latter text was an authentic Tibetan Buddhist document.[228] She continued to face accusations of fraud; U.S. newspaper The Sun published a July 1890 article based on information provided by an ex-member of the Society, Elliott Coues. Blavatsky sued the newspaper for libel, and they publicly retracted their accusations in September 1892.[229] That winter, Britain had been afflicted by an influenza epidemic, with Blavatsky contracting the virus; it led to her death on the afternoon of 8 May 1891, in Besant’s house.[230] The date would come to be commemorated by Theosophists ever since as White Lotus Day.[231] Her body was cremated at Woking Crematorium on 11 May.[232]

Personal life

Blavatsky talked incessantly in a guttural voice, sometimes wittily and sometimes crudely. She was indifferent to sex yet frank and open about it; fonder of animals than of people; welcoming, unpretentious, scandalous, capricious and rather noisy. She was also humorous, vulgar, impulsive and warm-hearted, and didn’t give a hoot for anyone or anything.

—Biographer Peter Washington, 1993.[233]

The biographer Peter Washington described Blavatsky as “a short, stout, forceful woman, with strong arms, several chins, unruly hair, a determined mouth, and large, liquid, slightly bulging eyes”.[234] She had distinctive azure colored eyes,[235] and was overweight throughout her life.[236] According to the biographer Marion Meade, Blavatsky’s “general appearance was outrageously untidy”.[237] In later life, she was known for wearing loose robes, and wore many rings on her fingers.[233] She was a heavy cigarette smoker throughout her life,[238] and was known for smoking hashish at times.[239] She lived simply and her followers believed that she refused to accept monetary payment in return for disseminating her teachings.[240] Blavatsky preferred to be known by the acronym “HPB”,[241] a sobriquet applied to her by many of her friends which was first developed by Olcott.[242] She avoided social functions and was scornful of social obligations.[243] She spoke Russian, Georgian, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Sanskrit.[244]

Meade referred to her as “an eccentric who abided by no rules except her own”,[245] someone who had “utter disregard for the Victorian code of morality”.[246] Meade believed that Blavatsky perceived herself as a messianic figure whose purpose was to save the world by promoting Theosophy.[245] Lachman stated that Blavatsky exhibited what he referred to as “Russian traits – an intense devotion to spiritual truth, combined with a profound contradictory character.”[247] Washington expressed the view that she was “a persuasive story-teller [with the] power to fascinate others” although noted that she was also “self-absorbed and egotistical”.[248] For Meade, Blavatsky had a “vivid imagination” and a “propensity for lying”.[249] Godwin noted that Blavatsky had “a fearsome temper”.[244] The religious studies scholar Bruce F. Campbell noted that she had been a “strong-willed, independent child”, and that the harsh environment of her childhood might have resulted in her “difficulty in controlling her temper and … her tendency to swear”.[250] In his opinion, she represented “an archetypal charismatic leader”.[251] Anthropologist Leo Klejn claimed that Blavatsky’s indefatigability and energy were surprising.[252] The Indologist Alexander Senkevich stated that Blavatsky’s charisma exerted influence on Charles Massey and Stainton Moses.[253]

Blavatsky’s sexuality has been an issue of dispute; many biographers have believed that she remained celibate throughout her life,[254] with Washington believing that she “hated sex with her own sort of passion”.[255] In later life she stated that she was a virgin, although she had been married to two men during her lifetime.[245] Throughout its early years, the Theosophical Society promoted celibacy, even within marriage.[256] Some have suggested that she may have been a lesbian or transvestite, due to early accounts in which she traveled while dressed in masculine attire.[257] Meade thought that Blavatsky had, with a few exceptions, been “contemptuous” of other women, suggesting that while this may have been the result of general societal misogyny, it may have reflected that Blavatsky had been jilted by another woman.[235]

Socio-political beliefs

Godwin suggested that Blavatsky’s life work was “not only spiritual but socially idealistic and fiercely political”.[258] He suggested that her “emotional fuel” was partly “a hatred of oppression”, which Godwin claimed was either through the intellectual domination of Christianity or British colonial rule in India.[258] Conversely, Meade thought Blavatsky to be “basically a non-political person”.[259]

Blavatsky’s social and political beliefs, like much else in her life, are not always consistent, though reflect what she felt she could reveal of a larger vision. That was, more than anything else, the vision of the succession of root races. These races were a flexible category, cultural as well as physiological, with races often combining in the course of history. Moreover, inspired by recent acrimonious debates over evolution, they are also dynamic, emergent forces. Gary Lachman wrote, “Although few historians have noted it, in Isis Unveiled (1877), Blavatsky presented the first major intellectual — not religious — criticism of evolution.” {Lachman 2012, 159-60} Blavatsky held that Darwinism explained human physical evolution, while spirituality followed another developmental pattern.

The scholar of religion Olav Hammer noted that “on rare occasions” Blavatsky’s writings are “overtly racist”,[260] adding that her antisemitism “derives from the unfortunate position of Judaism as the origin of Christianity” and refers to “the intense dislike she felt for Christianity”.[260] She wrote that “Judaism, built solely on Phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves.”[261]

At the same time, we must note the extensive and appreciative use she made of the Jewish mystical system, the Kabbala, although she thought its origins were earlier than historic Judaism. Henry Steel Olcott, in Old Diary Leaves, First series, tells of “a mystical Hebrew physician” who had studied the Kabbala deeply for thirty years, discussed it with Blavatsky in lengthy conversations, and reportedly said that despite his profound research “he had not discovered the true meanings that she read into certain texts, and that illumined them with a holy light.” {Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, First Series. Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1941, p. 477} In a passage in Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky praised the Jews: “Nor should we compel the Jews to do penance for their fathers. . . How faithfully and nobly they have stood by their ancestral faith under the diabolical persecutions. . . The Jews remain substantially united. Even their differences of opinion do not destroy their unity.” {Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol. II. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, n 1972, p. 526}

As for Christianity, her main dislike was toward Roman Catholicism and missionary Protestantism. She had good relations with certain liberal Protestants, nor did she offer much criticism of her natal Eastern Orthodoxy. In Isis Unveiled, she spoke well of Jesus as one who, though a “poor, unknown Jewish carpenter” and “no master of social etiquette,” nonetheless became a great reformer, teaching a “sublime code of ethics,” and also, like Paul and other early church fathers an “initiate,” qualified to teach and practice the Ancient Wisdom in terms suitable to the time and place. {Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, 148–50, 562} She also made much favorable use of Gnosticism, increasingly recognized as a valid form of early Christianity.

[262] About physical races, she wrote that Africans, aboriginal Australians, and South Sea Islanders are inferior to Europeans, stating “MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the ‘narrow-brained’ savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had.”[263] She referred to aboriginal Australians as “half-animal”.[264] The dynamic, evolutionary nature of races must also be kept in mind, however. In The Secret Doctrine she postulates that, “If tomorrow the continent of Europe were to disappear and other lands re-emerge instead, and if the African tribes were to separate and scatter on the face of the earth, it is they who, in about a hundred thousand years hence, would form the bulk of the civilized natures. . . Thus the reason given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.” {Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II. Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993, P. 425. Italics in original} It was in 1886, two years before The Secret Doctrine and five before Blavatsky’s death, that the General Council of the Theosophical Society adopted as the first of the Society’s three objects, “To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, or color.” (In 1888 without distinction of sex or caste was added.) {Philip S. Harris, ed., Theosophical Encyclopedia. Quezon City, Philippines, 2006, “Theosophical Society, Objects of the,” 631-32}

After spending time in India, Blavatsky adopted a belief in reincarnation (as shown here in Hindu art)

Blavatsky advocated the idea of “Root Races”, each of which was divided into seven Sub-Races.[289] In Blavatsky’s cosmogony, the first Root Race were created from pure spirit and lived on a continent known as the “Imperishable Sacred Land”.[287][290] The second Root Race, known as the Hyperboreans, were also formed from pure spirit and lived on a land near to the North Pole, which then had a mild climate.[287] The third lived on the continent of Lemuria, which Blavatsky alleged survives today as Australia and Rapa Nui.[291][292] Blavatsky alleged that during the fourth Round of the Earth, higher beings descended to the planet, with the beginnings of human physical bodies developing and the sexes separating.[289] At this point, the fourth Root Race appeared, living on the continent of Atlantis; they had physical bodies but also psychic powers and advanced technology.[293] She claimed that some Atlanteans were giants and built such ancient monuments as Stonehenge in southern England and that they also mated with “she-animals”, resulting in the creation of gorillas and chimpanzees.[289] The Atlanteans were decadent and abused their power and knowledge, so Atlantis sunk into the sea, although various Atlanteans escaped and created new societies in Egypt and the Americas.[289]

The fifth Root Race to emerge was the Aryans and was found across the world at the time she was writing.[289][294] She believed that the fifth Race would come to be replaced by the sixth, which would be heralded by the arrival of Maitreya, a figure from Mahayana Buddhist mythology.[295] She further believed that humanity would eventually develop into the final, seventh Root Race.[289][296] Lachman suggested that by reading Blavatsky’s cosmogonical claims as a literal account of history, “we may be doing it a disservice.”[289] He instead suggested that it could be read as Blavatsky’s attempt to formulate “a new myth for the modern age, or as a huge, fantastic science fiction story”.[289]

Blavatsky taught that humans composed of three separate parts: a divine spark, an astral fluid body, and the physical body.[297] Later Blavatsky proclaimed the septenary of Man and Universe.[298] According to Blavatsky, man is composed of seven parts: Atma, Buddhi, Manas, Kama rupa, Linga sharira, Prana, and Sthula sharira.[298] In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky denied that humans would be reincarnated back on the Earth after physical death.[299] However, by the time that she had authored The Secret Doctrine, she had changed her opinion on this issue, likely influenced by her time in India.[300] Here, she stated that the law of reincarnation was governed by karma, with humanity’s final purpose being the emancipation of the soul from the cycle of death and rebirth.[301] She believed that knowledge of karma would ensure that human beings lived according to moral principles, arguing that it provided a far greater basis for moral action than that of the Christian doctrine.[302] Blavatsky wrote, in Isis Unveiled, that Spiritualism “alone offers a possible last refuge of compromise between” the “revealed religions and materialistic philosophies”. While she acknowledged that fanatic believers “remained blind to its imperfections”, she wrote that such a fact was “no excuse to doubt its reality” and asserted that Spiritualist fanaticism was “itself a proof of the genuineness and possibility of their phenomena”.[303]

Goodrick-Clarke noted that Blavatsky’s cosmology contained all four of the prime characteristics of Western esotericism that had been identified by the scholar Antoine Faivre: “(a) correspondences between all parts of the universe, the macrocosm and microcosm; (b) living nature as a complex, plural, hierarchical, and animate whole; (c) imagination and mediations in the form of intermediary spirits, symbols, and mandalas; and (d) the experience of transmutation of the soul through purification and ascent.”[304]

Reception

[Blavatsky was] one of the most significant, controversial, and prolific of modern esotericists … It is more than evident that, whatever one thinks of the more flamboyant aspects of this remarkable and many-sided woman, she possessed a keen intellect and a wide-ranging vision of what occultism could be in the modern world.

—Religious studies scholar Robert Ellwood, 2005.[305]

Blavatsky was a highly controversial figure,[306] and attitudes toward her were typically polarized into extreme camps, one uncritically idolizing her as a holy guru and the other expressing complete disdain for her as a charlatan.[307] Washington suggested that Blavatsky generated such controversy because she courted publicity without knowing how to manage it.[308] Blavatsky’s devotees often try to attribute the criticism that she sustained to the fact that she attacked the vested interests of both the Christian establishment and the material scientific skeptics, rather than it being a reaction to her frauds and impostures. Thus, all critics of her are deflected by her believers, who say that “the slanders on her reputation are the signs of grace: the stigmata that all great martyrs must bear.”[309]

Various authors have questioned the authenticity of her writings, citing evidence that they are heavily plagiarized from older esoteric sources,[310][311][312][313] pronouncing her claim of the existence of masters of wisdom to be utterly false, and accusing her of being a charlatan, a false medium, and a falsifier of letters.[314][315] Her supporters claimed most of the accusations were undocumented. The Eastern literature scholar Arthur Lillie published a long list of extracts from mystic works next to extracts from Blavatsky’s writings purporting to show her extensive plagiarism in his book Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy. Lillie also analysed the Mahatma letters and asserted they had been written by Blavatsky, based on certain peculiarities of expression and spelling.[316][173] The traditionalist René Guénon wrote a detailed critique of Theosophy, in which he claimed that Blavatsky had acquired all her knowledge naturally from other books, not from any supernatural masters.[310] Carl Jung virulently criticized her work. Agehananda Bharati dismissed it as “a melee of horrendous hogwash and of fertile inventions of inane esoterica”. Mircea Eliade suggested that her theory of spiritual evolution contradicts the entire spirit of Eastern tradition, which is “precisely an anti-evolutionist conception of the spiritual life”.[317] After her death, Blavatsky continued to be accused of having fraudulently produced paranormal phenomena by skeptics such as John Nevil Maskelyne,[318] Robert Todd Carroll,[319] and James Randi.[320]

According to religious studies scholar Mark Bevir, Blavatsky “adapted the occult tradition to meet the challenge of Victorian science and morality”.[321] Historian Ronald Hutton described Blavatsky as “one of the century’s truly international figures”, whose ideas gained “considerable popularity”.[322] Various biographers have noted that by the late 20th and early 21st century, Blavatsky was little known among the general public.[323] In 2006, scholar James A. Santucci nevertheless noted that she was “as visible today as any modern trend-setting guru, and she will most likely remain the most memorable and innovative esotericist of the 19th century.”[324]

Parasychologist Nandor Fodor stated, “Whatever result psycho-analysts may arrive at in the study of her [Blavatsky’s] complex character, it must be admitted that she was a remarkable woman and that she indeed possessed psychic powers which, however, fell far short of the miraculous feats she constantly aimed at.”[325] A number of authors, primarily Scholars, have suggested that Blavatsky sometimes spoke and/or wrote out of altered states of consciousness.[325][326][327] G. R. S. Mead wrote about Blavatsky, “I know no one who detested, more than she did, any attempt to hero-worship herself – she positively physically shuddered at any expression of reverence to herself – as a spiritual teacher; I have heard her cry out in genuine alarm at an attempt to kneel to her made by an enthusiastic admirer.”[282] Leo Klejn wrote about Blavatsky, “Indefatigability and energy of this woman were surprising. She had a revolutionary’s merits.”[252][a] Another person who said Blavatsky was a remarkable woman was a former associate and publisher of the Theosophical magazine Lucifer 1887–1889, Mabel Collins. After leaving the movement she said “She taught me one great lesson. I learned from her how foolish, how ‘gullible’, how easily flattered human beings are, taken en masse. Her contempt for her kind was on the same gigantic scale as everything else about her, except her marvellously delicate taper fingers. In all else, she was a big woman. She had a greater power over the weak and credulous, a greater capacity for making black appear white, a larger waist, a more voracious appetite, a more confirmed passion for tobacco, a more ceaseless and insatiable hatred for those whom she thought to be her enemies, a greater disrespect for les convenances, a worse temper, a greater command of bad language, and a greater contempt for the intelligence of her fellow-beings than I had ever supposed possible to be contained in one person. These, I suppose, must be reckoned as her vices, though whether a creature so indifferent to all ordinary standards of right and wrong can be held to have virtues or vices, I know not.”[328][329]

The book The Voice of the Silence presented by Blavatsky to Leo Tolstoy

Blavatsky presented her book The Voice of the Silence, The Seven gates, Two Paths to Leo Tolstoy. In his works, Tolstoy used the dicta from the theosophical journal Theosophischer Wegweiser.[330] In his diary, he wrote on 12 February 1903, “I am reading a beautiful theosophical journal and find many commonalities with my understanding.”[331]

Influence

Theosophical movement

According to Kalnitsky, the Theosophical movement of the nineteenth century was created and defined in the main through the astuteness and conceptual ideas provided by H.P. Blavatsky. He stated that “without her charismatic leadership and uncompromising promotion of the Theosophical agenda, it appears unlikely that the movement could have attained its unique form.”[332] By the time of her death in 1891 she was the acknowledged head of a community numbering nearly 100,000, with journalistic organs in London, Paris, New York and Madras.[333] Her writings have been translated and published in a wide range of European and Asian languages.[334]

Blavatsky’s Theosophy redirected the interest in Spiritualism toward a more coherent doctrine that included cosmology with theory of evolution in an understanding of humanity’s spiritual development.[335] Further, it took the traditional sources of Western esotericism and globalized them by restating many of their ideas in terminology adopted from Asian religions.[335] Blavatsky’s Theosophy was able to appeal to women by de-emphasizing the importance of gender and allowing them to take on spiritual leadership equal to that of men, thus allowing them a greater role than that permitted in traditional Christianity.[336]

Since its inception, and through doctrinal assimilation or divergence, Theosophy has also given rise to or influenced the development of other mystical, philosophical, and religious movements.[337] During the 1920s the Theosophical Society Adyar had around 7,000 members in the U.S.[338] There also was a substantial following in Asia. According to a Theosophical source, the Indian section in 2008 was said to have around 13,000 members while in the US the 2008 membership was reported at around 3,900.[339]

Western esotericism

Blavatsky’s Theosophy has been described as representing “a major factor in the modern revival” of Western esotericism.[340] Godwin deemed there to be “no more important figure in modern times” within the Western esoteric tradition than Blavatsky.[244] For Johnson, Blavatsky was “a central figure in the nineteenth-century occult revival”.[341] Lachman claimed that “practically all modern occultism and esotericism” can trace its origins back to her influence.[342] Blavatsky’s published Theosophical ideas, particularly those regarding Root Races, have been cited as an influence on Ariosophy, the esoteric movement established in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.[343][344] Hannah Newman stated that via Ariosophy, Blavatsky’s Theosophical ideas “contributed to Nazi ideology”.[345] Nevertheless, Lachman has asserted that Blavatsky should not be held accountable to any of the antisemitic and racist ideas that the Ariosophists promoted, commenting that were she alive to witness the development of Ariosophy she probably would have denounced its ideas regarding race.[346] Blavatsky’s Theosophical ideas regarding Root Races have also been cited as an influence on Anthroposophy, the esoteric movement developed by Rudolf Steiner in early 20th-century Germany,[347] with Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society being termed a “historical offshoot” of the Theosophical Society.[348]

Blavatsky’s Theosophy has been cited as an influence on the New Age Movement, an esoteric current that emerged in Western nations during the 1970s.[349] “No single organization or movement has contributed so many components to the New Age Movement as the Theosophical Society. … It has been the major force in the dissemination of occult literature in the West in the twentieth century.”[350][b] Other organizations loosely based on Theosophical texts and doctrines include the Agni Yoga, and a group of religions based on Theosophy called the Ascended Master Teachings: the “I AM” Activity, The Bridge to Freedom, Universal Medicine and The Summit Lighthouse, which evolved into the Church Universal and Triumphant.[352]

Linguistics

American scholar of religion Jason Josephson-Storm has argued that Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society influenced late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academic linguistics. Josephson-Storm notes that Blavatsky’s linguistic theories and typologies were widely circulated in Europe, and that influential linguists such as Émile-Louis Burnouf and Benjamin Lee Whorf either practiced Theosophy as promoted by the Theosophical Society or publicly defended its doctrines.[353] Ferdinand de Saussure is also known to have attended séances and wrote a lengthy analysis of the Theosophical claims about linguistics and India, “la théosophie brahmanique (Brahamanic Theosophy)” while delivering his Cours de linguistique générale.[354]

South Asian religion and politics

Hutton suggested that Blavatsky had a greater impact in Asia than in the Western world.[281] Blavatsky has been cited as having inspired Hindus to respect their own religious roots.[355] The Theosophical Society influenced the growth of Indian national consciousness, with prominent figures in the Indian independence movement, among them Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, being inspired by Theosophy to study their own national heritage.[356] The Theosophical Society had a major influence on Buddhist modernism and Hindu reform movements,[357] while Blavatsky and Olcott took part in Anagarika Dharmapala’s revival of Theravada Buddhism in Ceylon.[358][359]

Meade stated that “more than any other single individual”, Blavatsky was responsible for bringing a knowledge of Eastern religion and philosophy to the West.[355] Blavatsky believed that Indian religion offered answers to problems then facing Westerners; in particular, she believed that Indian religion contained an evolutionary cosmology which complemented Darwinian evolutionary theory, and that the Indian doctrine of reincarnation met many of the moral qualms surrounding vicarious atonement and eternal damnation that preoccupied 19th-century Westerners.[360] In doing so, Meade believed that Blavatsky paved the way for the emergence of later movements such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Transcendental Meditation movement, Zen Buddhism, and yoga in the West.[355] Hutton believed that the two greatest achievements of Blavatsky’s movement were in popularizing belief in reincarnation and in a singular divine world soul within the West.[361]

Blavatsky “both incorporated a number of the doctrines of eastern religions into her occultism, and interpreted eastern religions in the light of her occultism”, in doing so extending a view of the “mystical East” that had already been popularized through Romanticist poetry.[362] Max Müller scathingly criticized Blavatsky’s Esoteric Buddhism. Whilst he was willing to give her credit for good motives, at least at the beginning of her career, in his view she ceased to be truthful both to herself and to others with her later “hysterical writings and performances”. There is a nothing esoteric or secretive in Buddhism, he wrote, in fact the very opposite. “Whatever was esoteric was ipso facto not Buddha’s teaching; whatever was Buddha’s teaching was ipso facto not esoteric”.[363][c] Blavatsky, it seemed to Müller, “was either deceived by others or carried away by her own imaginations.”[364] Blavatsky responded to those academic specialists in Indian religion who accused her of misrepresenting it by claiming that they understood only the exoteric nature of Hinduism and Buddhism and not the inner esoteric secrets of these faiths, which she traced back to the ancient Vedas.[365]

Arthur Conan Doyle

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Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle

KStJ DL

Arthur Conan Doyle in June 1914

Arthur Conan Doyle in June 1914

Born      Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

22 May 1859

Edinburgh, Scotland

Died       7 July 1930 (aged 71)

Crowborough, England

Occupation        

Writerphysician

Education            University of Edinburgh

Genre   

Detective fictionfantasyscience fictionhistorical novelsnon-fiction

Notable works  

Stories of Sherlock Holmes

The Lost World

Spouse 

Louisa Hawkins

​

​(m. 1885; died 1906)​

Jean Leckie ​(m. 1907)​

Children               5 (including Adrian and Jean)

Signature            

Website

http://www.conandoyleestate.com

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

Contents

1             Name

2             Early life

3             Medical career

4             Literary career

4.1         Sherlock Holmes

4.2         Other works

5             Sporting career

6             Family life

7             Political campaigning

8             Justice advocate

9             Freemasonry and spiritualism

10           Doyle and the Piltdown Hoax

11           Architecture

12           Honours and awards

13           Death

14           Portrayals

14.1       Television series

14.2       Television films

14.3       Theatrical films

14.4       Other media

15           In fiction

16           See also

17           References

18           Further reading

19           External links

Name

Doyle is often referred to as “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” or “Conan Doyle”, implying that “Conan” is part of a compound surname rather than a middle name. His baptism entry in the register of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives “Arthur Ignatius Conan” as his given names and “Doyle” as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather.[1] The catalogues of the British Library and the Library of Congress treat “Doyle” alone as his surname.[2]

Steven Doyle, editor of The Baker Street Journal, wrote: “Conan was Arthur’s middle name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply ‘Doyle’.”[3] When knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle.[4]

Early life

Portrait of Doyle by Herbert Rose Barraud, 1893

Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.[5][6] His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England, of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855.[7] In 1864 the family scattered because of Charles’s growing alcoholism, and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. Arthur lodged with Mary Burton, the aunt of a friend, at Liberton Bank House on Gilmerton Road, while studying at Newington Academy.[8]

In 1867, the family came together again and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place.[9] Doyle’s father died in 1893, in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.[10][11] Beginning at an early age, throughout his life Doyle wrote letters to his mother, and many of them were preserved.[12]

Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to England, to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College, which he attended until 1875. While Doyle was not unhappy at Stonyhurst, he said he did not have any fond memories of it because the school was run on medieval principles: the only subjects covered were rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean geometry, algebra and the classics.[13] Doyle commented later in his life that this academic system could only be excused “on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumbbell by which one can improve one’s mind.”[13] He also found the school harsh, noting that, instead of compassion and warmth, it favoured the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation.[14]

From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria.[9] His family decided that he would spend a year there in order to perfect his German and broaden his academic horizons.[15] He later rejected the Catholic faith and became an agnostic.[16] One source attributed his drift away from religion to the time he spent in the less strict Austrian school.[14] He also later became a spiritualist mystic.[17]

Medical career

From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School; during this period he spent time working in Aston (then a town in Warwickshire, now part of Birmingham), Sheffield and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire.[18] Also during this period, he studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.[19] While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, “The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe”, was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood’s Magazine.[9] His first published piece, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley”, a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879.[9][20] On 20 September 1879, he published his first academic article, “Gelsemium as a Poison” in the British Medical Journal,[9][21][22] a study which The Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century murder investigation.[23]

Professor Challenger by Harry Rountree in the novella The Poison Belt published in The Strand Magazine

Doyle was the doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880.[24] On 11 July 1880, John Gray’s Hope and David Gray’s Eclipse met up with the Eira and Leigh Smith. The photographer W.J.A. Grant took a photograph aboard the Eira of Doyle along with Smith, the Gray brothers, and ship’s surgeon William Neale, who were members of the Smith expedition. That expedition explored Franz Josef Land, and led to the naming, on 18 August, of Cape Flora, Bell Island, Nightingale Sound, Gratton (“Uncle Joe”) Island, and Mabel Island.[25]

After graduating with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery (M.B. C.M.) degrees from the University of Edinburgh in 1881, he was ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast.[9] He completed his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree (an advanced degree beyond the basic medical qualification in the UK) with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis in 1885.[26]

In 1882, Doyle partnered with his former classmate George Turnavine Budd in a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice.[9][27] Arriving in Portsmouth in June 1882, with less than £10 (£1100 in 2019[28]) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea.[29] The practice was not successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle returned to writing fiction.

Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators.[30][31]

In early 1891, Doyle embarked on the study of ophthalmology in Vienna. He had previously studied at the Portsmouth Eye Hospital in order to qualify to perform eye tests and prescribe glasses. Vienna had been suggested by his friend Vernon Morris as a place to spend six months and train to be an eye surgeon. But Doyle found it too difficult to understand the German medical terms being used in his classes in Vienna, and soon quit his studies there. For the rest of his two-month stay in Vienna, he pursued other activities, such as ice skating with his wife Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the London Times. He also wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw.

After visiting Venice and Milan, he spent a few days in Paris observing Edmund Landolt, an expert on diseases of the eye. Within three months of his departure for Vienna, Doyle returned to London. He opened a small office and consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, or 2 Devonshire Place as it was then. (There is today a Westminster City Council commemorative plaque over the front door.) He had no patients, according to his autobiography, and his efforts as an ophthalmologist were a failure.[32][33][34]

Literary career

Main article: Arthur Conan Doyle bibliography

Sherlock Holmes

Portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget, 1904

Doyle struggled to find a publisher. His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights to the story. The piece appeared a year later in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.[9]

Holmes was partially modelled on Doyle’s former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes … round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man”,[35] and in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, “It is no wonder that after the study of such a character [viz., Bell] I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”[36] Robert Louis Stevenson was able to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: “My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. … can this be my old friend Joe Bell?”[37] Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin.[38] Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle’s, Dr. James Watson.[39]

Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Doyle, which was demolished c. 1970

A sequel to A Study in Scarlet was commissioned, and The Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock company. Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the publishing world, and so, after this, he left them.[9] Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine. Doyle wrote the first five Holmes short stories from his office at 2 Upper Wimpole Street (then known as Devonshire Place), which is now marked by a memorial plaque.[40]

Doyle’s attitude towards his most famous creation was ambivalent.[39] In November 1891, he wrote to his mother: “I think of slaying Holmes, … and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” His mother responded, “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!”[41] In an attempt to deflect publishers’ demands for more Holmes stories, he raised his price to a level intended to discourage them, but found they were willing to pay even the large sums he asked.[39] As a result, he became one of the best-paid authors of his time.

Statue of Holmes and the English Church in Meiringen

In December 1893, to dedicate more of his time to his historical novels, Doyle had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the story “The Final Problem”. Public outcry, however, led him to feature Holmes in 1901 in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes’ fictional connection with the Reichenbach Falls is celebrated in the nearby town of Meiringen.

In 1903, Doyle published his first Holmes short story in ten years, “The Adventure of the Empty House”, in which it was explained that only Moriarty had fallen, but since Holmes had other dangerous enemies—especially Colonel Sebastian Moran—he had arranged to make it look as if he too were dead. Holmes was ultimately featured in a total of 56 short stories—the last published in 1927—and four novels by Doyle, and has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors.

Jane Stanford compares some of Moriarty’s characteristics to those of the Fenian John O’Connor Power. “The Final Problem” was published the year the Second Home Rule Bill passed through the House of Commons. “The Valley of Fear” was serialised in 1914, the year Home Rule, the Government of Ireland Act (18 September) was placed on the Statute Book.[42]

Other works

Doyle’s house in South Norwood

Doyle’s first novels were The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, and the unfinished Narrative of John Smith, published only posthumously, in 2011.[43] He amassed a portfolio of short stories, including “The Captain of the Pole-Star” and “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”, both inspired by Doyle’s time at sea. The latter popularised the mystery of the Mary Celeste[44] and added fictional details such as that the ship was found in perfect condition (it had actually taken on water by the time it was discovered), and that its boats remained on board (the single boat was in fact missing). These fictional details have come to dominate popular accounts of the incident,[9][44] and Doyle’s alternate spelling of the ship’s name as the Marie Celeste has become more commonly used than the original spelling.[45]

Between 1888 and 1906, Doyle wrote seven historical novels, which he and many critics regarded as his best work.[39] He also wrote nine other novels, and—later in his career (1912–29)—five narratives (two of novel length) featuring the irascible scientist Professor Challenger. The Challenger stories include his best-known work after the Holmes oeuvre, The Lost World. His historical novels include The White Company and its prequel Sir Nigel, set in the Middle Ages. He was a prolific author of short stories, including two collections set in Napoleonic times and featuring the French character Brigadier Gerard.

Doyle’s works for the stage include: Waterloo, which centres on the reminiscences of an English veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and features a character Gregory Brewster, written for Henry Irving; The House of Temperley, the plot of which reflects his abiding interest in boxing; The Speckled Band, adapted from his earlier short story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”; and an 1893 collaboration with J. M. Barrie on the libretto of Jane Annie.[46]

Sporting career

While living in Southsea, the seaside resort of Portsmouth, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur side, under the pseudonym A. C. Smith.[47]

Doyle was a keen cricketer, and between 1899 and 1907 he played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).[48] He also played for the amateur cricket teams the Allahakbarries and the Authors XI alongside fellow writers J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne.[49][50] His highest score, in 1902 against London County, was 43. He was an occasional bowler who took one first-class wicket, W. G. Grace, and wrote a poem about the achievement.[51]

In 1901, Doyle was one of three judges for the world’s first major bodybuilding competition, which was organized by the “Father of Bodybuilding”, Eugen Sandow. The event was held in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The other two judges were the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge and Eugen Sandow himself.[52]

Doyle was an amateur boxer.[53] In 1909, he was invited to referee the James Jeffries–Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada. Doyle wrote: “I was much inclined to accept … though my friends pictured me as winding up with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other. However, the distance and my engagements presented a final bar.”[53]

Also a keen golfer, Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex for 1910. He had moved to Little Windlesham house in Crowborough with Jean Leckie, his second wife, and resided there with his family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.[54]

He entered the English Amateur billiards championship in 1913.[55]

Family life

Doyle with his family c. 1923–1925

Arthur Conan Doyle by George Wylie Hutchinson, 1894

In 1885 Doyle married Louisa (sometimes called “Touie”) Hawkins (1857–1906). She was the youngest daughter of J. Hawkins, of Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, and the sister of one of Doyle’s patients. Louisa suffered from tuberculosis.[56] In 1907, the year after Louisa’s death, he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874–1940). He had met and fallen in love with Jean in 1897, but had maintained a platonic relationship with her while his first wife was still alive, out of loyalty to her.[57] Jean outlived him by ten years, and died in London.[58]

Doyle fathered five children. He had two with his first wife: Mary Louise (1889–1976) and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, known as Kingsley (1892–1918). He had an additional three with his second wife: Denis Percy Stewart (1909–1955), who became the second husband of Georgian Princess Nina Mdivani; Adrian Malcolm (1910–1970); and Jean Lena Annette (1912–1997).[59] All of Doyle’s five children died without issue, so he has no living direct descendants.[60][61]

Political campaigning

Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900,[62] during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). Later that same year, he wrote a book on the war, The Great Boer War, as well as a short work titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in which he responded to critics of the United Kingdom’s role in that war, and argued that its role was justified. The latter work was widely translated, and Doyle believed it was the reason he was knighted (given the rank of Knight Bachelor) by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours.[63] (He received the accolade from the King in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October of that year.)[64]

He stood for Parliament twice as a Liberal Unionist: in 1900 in Edinburgh Central; and in 1906 in the Hawick Burghs. He received a respectable share of the vote, but was not elected.[65] He served as a Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey beginning in 1902,[66] and was appointed a Knight of Grace of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in 1903.[67]

Doyle was a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State that was led by the journalist E. D. Morel and diplomat Roger Casement. In 1909 he wrote The Crime of the Congo, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors of that colony. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, and it is possible that, together with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, they inspired several characters that appear in his 1912 novel The Lost World.[68] Later, after the Easter Rising, Casement was found guilty of treason against the Crown, and was sentenced to death. Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save him, arguing that Casement had been driven mad, and therefore should not be held responsible for his actions.[69]

As the First World War loomed, and having been caught up in a growing public swell of Germanophobia, Doyle gave a public donation of 10 shillings to the anti-immigration British Brothers’ League.[70]

Justice advocate

Doyle statue in Crowborough, East Sussex

Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two men being exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals in Great Wyrley. Police were set on Edalji’s conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed.[71] Apart from helping George Edalji, Doyle’s work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice, as it was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.[72]

The story of Doyle and Edalji was dramatised in an episode of the 1972 BBC television series, The Edwardians. In Nicholas Meyer’s pastiche The West End Horror (1976), Holmes manages to help clear the name of a shy Parsi Indian character wronged by the English justice system. Edalji was of Parsi heritage on his father’s side. The story was fictionalised in Julian Barnes’s 2005 novel Arthur and George, which was adapted into a three-part drama by ITV in 2015.

The second case, that of Oscar Slater—a Jew of German origin who operated a gambling den and was convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908—excited Doyle’s curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case and a general sense that Slater was not guilty. He ended up paying most of the costs for Slater’s successful 1928 appeal.[73]

Freemasonry and spiritualism

Doyle had a longstanding interest in mystical subjects and remained fascinated by the idea of paranormal phenomena, even though the strength of his belief in their reality waxed and waned periodically over the years.

In 1887, in Southsea, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, Doyle began a series of investigations into the possibility of psychic phenomena and attended about 20 seances, experiments in telepathy, and sittings with mediums. Writing to spiritualist journal Light that year, he declared himself to be a spiritualist, describing one particular event that had convinced him psychic phenomena were real.[74] Also in 1887 (on 26 January), he was initiated as a Freemason at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. (He resigned from the Lodge in 1889, returned to it in 1902, and resigned again in 1911.)[75]

In 1889, he became a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research; in 1893, he joined the London-based Society for Psychical Research; and in 1894, he collaborated with Sir Sidney Scott and Frank Podmore in a search for poltergeists in Devon.[76]

Doyle and the spiritualist William Thomas Stead (before the latter was lost in the sinking of the Titanic) were led to believe that Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, and they claimed publicly that the Zancigs used telepathy. However, in 1924, the Zancigs confessed that their mind reading act had been a trick; they published the secret code and all other details of the trick method they had used under the title “Our Secrets!!” in a London newspaper.[77] Doyle also praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations that he believed had been produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, both of whom were also later exposed as frauds.[78]

In 1916, at the height of the First World War, Doyle’s belief in psychic phenomena was strengthened by what he took to be the psychic abilities of his children’s nanny, Lily Loder Symonds.[79] This and the constant drumbeat of wartime deaths inspired him with the idea that spiritualism was what he called a “New Revelation”[80] sent by God to bring solace to the bereaved. He wrote a piece in Light magazine about his faith and began lecturing frequently on spiritualism. In 1918, he published his first spiritualist work, The New Revelation.

Some have mistakenly assumed that Doyle’s turn to spiritualism was prompted by the death of his son Kingsley, but Doyle began presenting himself publicly as a spiritualist in 1916, and Kingsley died on 28 October 1918 (from pneumonia contracted during his convalescence after being seriously wounded in the 1916 Battle of the Somme).[80] Nevertheless, the war-related deaths of many people who were close to him appears to have even further strengthened his long-held belief in life after death and spirit communication. Doyle’s brother Brigadier-general Innes Doyle died, also from pneumonia, in February 1919. His two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles), as well as his two nephews, also died shortly after the war. His second book on spiritualism, The Vital Message, appeared in 1919.

Doyle found solace in supporting spiritualism’s ideas and the attempts of spiritualists to find proof of an existence beyond the grave. In particular, according to some,[81] he favoured Christian Spiritualism and encouraged the Spiritualists’ National Union to accept an eighth precept – that of following the teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a member of the renowned supernaturalist organisation The Ghost Club.[82]

Doyle with his family in New York City, 1922

In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his flat in Bloomsbury, which Doyle attended. Although some later claimed that Doyle had endorsed the apparent instances of clairvoyance at that séance as genuine,[83][84] a contemporaneous report by the Sunday Express quoted Doyle as saying “I should have to see it again before passing a definite opinion on it” and “I have my doubts about the whole thing”.[85] In 1920, Doyle and the noted sceptic Joseph McCabe held a public debate at Queen’s Hall in London, with Doyle taking the position that the claims of spiritualism were true. After the debate, McCabe published a booklet Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, in which he laid out evidence refuting Doyle’s arguments and claimed that Doyle had been duped into believing in spiritualism through deliberate mediumship trickery.[86]

Doyle also debated the psychiatrist Harold Dearden, who vehemently disagreed with Doyle’s belief that many cases of diagnosed mental illness were the result of spirit possession.[87]

In 1920, Doyle travelled to Australia and New Zealand on spiritualist missionary work, and over the next several years, until his death, he continued his mission, giving talks about his spiritualist conviction in Britain, Europe, and the United States.[76]

One of the five photographs of Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies, taken by Elsie Wright in July 1917

Doyle wrote a novel The Land of Mist centered on spiritualist themes and featuring the character Professor Challenger. He also wrote many non-fiction spiritualist works. Perhaps his most famous of these was The Coming of the Fairies (1922),[88] in which Doyle described his beliefs about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits, reproduced the five Cottingley Fairies photographs, asserted that those who suspected them being faked were wrong, and expressed his conviction that they were authentic. Decades later, the photos were definitively shown to have been faked, and their creators admitted to the fakery.

Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini. Even though Houdini explained that his feats were based on illusion and trickery, Doyle was convinced that Houdini had supernatural powers and said as much in his work The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini’s friend Bernard M. L. Ernst recounted a time when Houdini had performed an impressive trick at his home in Doyle’s presence. Houdini had assured Doyle that the trick was pure illusion and had expressed the hope that this demonstration would persuade Doyle not to go around “endorsing phenomena” simply because he could think of no explanation for what he had seen other than supernatural power. However, according to Ernst, Doyle simply refused to believe that it had been a trick.[89] Houdini became a prominent opponent of the spiritualist movement in the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother. He insisted that spiritualist mediums employed trickery, and consistently exposed them as frauds. These differences between Houdini and Doyle eventually led to a bitter, public falling-out between them.[90]

In 1922, the psychical researcher Harry Price accused the “spirit photographer” William Hope of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained from other researchers.[91] Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research and predicted that, if he persisted in writing what he called “sewage” about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini.[92] Price wrote: “Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope.”[93] In response to the exposure of frauds that had been perpetrated by Hope and other spiritualists, Doyle led 84 members of the Society for Psychical Research to resign in protest from the society on the ground that they believed it was opposed to spiritualism.[94]

Doyle’s two-volume book The History of Spiritualism was published in 1926. W. Leslie Curnow, a spiritualist, contributed much research to the book.[95][96] Later that year, Robert John Tillyard wrote a predominantly supportive review of it in the journal Nature.[97] This review provoked controversy: Several other critics, notably A. A. Campbell Swinton, pointed out the evidence of fraud in mediumship, as well as Doyle’s non-scientific approach to the subject.[98][99][100] In 1927, Doyle gave a filmed interview, in which he spoke about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism.[101]

Doyle and the Piltdown Hoax

Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner noted that Doyle had a plausible motive—namely, revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics—and said that The Lost World appeared to contain several clues referring cryptically to his having been involved in the hoax.[102][103] Samuel Rosenberg’s 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how, throughout his writings, Doyle had provided overt clues to otherwise hidden or suppressed aspects of his way of thinking that seemed to support the idea that Doyle would be involved in such a hoax.[104]

However, more recent research suggests that Doyle was not involved. In 2016, researchers at the Natural History Museum and Liverpool John Moores University analyzed DNA evidence showing that responsibility for the hoax lay with the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, who had originally “found” the remains. He had initially not been considered the likely perpetrator, because the hoax was seen as being too elaborate for him to have devised. However, the DNA evidence showed that a supposedly ancient tooth he had “discovered” in 1915 (at a different site) came from the same jaw as that of the Piltdown Man, suggesting that he had planted them both. That tooth, too, was later proven to have been planted as part of a hoax.[105]

Dr Chris Stringer, an anthropologist from the Natural History Museum, was quoted as saying: “Conan Doyle was known to play golf at the Piltdown site and had even given Dawson a lift in his car to the area, but he was a public man and very busy[,] and it is very unlikely that he would have had the time [to create the hoax]. So there are some coincidences, but I think they are just coincidences. When you look at the fossil evidence[,] you can only associate Dawson with all the finds, and Dawson was known to be personally ambitious. He wanted professional recognition. He wanted to be a member of the Royal Society and he was after an MBE [sic[106]]. He wanted people to stop seeing him as an amateur”.[107]

Architecture

Façade of Undershaw with Doyle’s children, Mary and Kingsley, on the drive

Another of Doyle’s longstanding interests was architectural design. In 1895, when he commissioned an architect friend of his, Joseph Henry Ball, to build him a home, he played an active part in the design process.[108][109] The home in which he lived from October 1897 to September 1907, known as Undershaw (near Hindhead, in Surrey),[110] was used as a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004, when it was bought by a developer and then stood empty while conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it.[56] In 2012, the High Court in London ruled in favor of those seeking to preserve the historic building, ordering that the redevelopment permission be quashed on the ground that it had not been obtained through proper procedures.[111] The building was later approved to become part of Stepping Stones, a school for children with disabilities and special needs.

Doyle made his most ambitious foray into architecture in March 1912, while he was staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel: He sketched the original designs for a third-storey extension and for an alteration of the front facade of the building.[112] Work began later that year, and when it was finished, the building was a nearly exact manifestation of the plans Doyle had sketched. Superficial alterations have been subsequently made, but the essential structure is still clearly Doyle’s.[113]

In 1914, on a family trip to the Jasper National Park in Canada, he designed a golf course and ancillary buildings for a hotel. The plans were realised in full, but neither the golf course nor the buildings have survived.[114]

In 1926, Doyle laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist Temple in Camden, London. Of the building’s total £600 construction costs, he provided £500.[115]

Honours and awards

Knight-Bachelor.ribbon.png Knight Bachelor (1902)[4]

Order of St John (UK) ribbon -vector.svg Knight of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (1903)

Queens South Africa Medal BAR.svg Queen’s South Africa Medal (1901)

Cavaliere OCI BAR.svg Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy (1895)

Order of the Medjidie lenta.png Order of the Medjidie – 2nd Class (Ottoman Empire) (1907)

Death

Doyle’s grave at Minstead in Hampshire

Doyle in 1930, the year of his death, with his son Adrian

Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough, East Sussex, on 7 July 1930. He died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward his wife: “You are wonderful.”[116] At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried on 11 July 1930 in Windlesham rose garden.

He was later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire.[9] Carved wooden tablets to his memory and to the memory of his wife, originally from the church at Minstead, are on display as part of a Sherlock Holmes exhibition at Portsmouth Museum.[117][118] The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: “Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician and man of letters”.[119]

A statue honours Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years.[120] There is a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, close to the house where Doyle was born.[121]

Portrayals