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floor, windows, and furniture, so that the poor man begged not to be left alone
in the room with the patient.
In the spring of 1860 the two sisters left Rougodevo for a visit to their
grandparents in the south of Russia, and during the long slow journey many
incidents took place. At one station, where a surly, half-drunken station-master
refused to lend them a fresh relay of horses, and there was no fit room for
their accommodation over the night, Helena terrified him into sense and reason
by whispering into his ear some strange secret of his, which he believed no one
knew and which it was to his interest to keep hidden.
At Jadonsk, where a halt was made, they attended a church service, where the
prelate, the famous and learned Isidore, who had known them in childhood,
recognized them and invited them to visit him at the Metropolitan's house. He
received them when they came with great kindliness; but hardly had they entered
the drawing room than a terrible hubbub of noise and raps burst forth in every
direction. Every piece of furniture strained and cracked, rocked and thumped.
The women were confused by this demoniacal demonstration in the presence of the
amazed Churchman, though the culprit in the case was hardly able to repress her
sense of humor. But the priest saw the embarrassment of his guests and
understood the cause of it. He inquired which of the two women possessed such
strange potencies. He was told. Then he asked permission to put to her invisible
guide a mental question. She assented. His query, a serious one, received an
instant reply, precise and to the point; and he was so struck with it all that
he detained his visitors for over three hours. He continued his conversation
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with the unseen presences and paid unstinted tribute to their seeming all-
knowledge. His farewell words to his gifted guest were:
"As for you, let not your heart be troubled by the gift you are possessed of . .
. for it was surely given to you for some purpose, and you could not be held
responsible for it. Quite the reverse! For if you but use it with discrimination
you will be enabled to do much good to your fellow-creatures."
Her occult powers grew at this period to their full development, and she seemed
to have completed the subjection of every phase of manifestation to her own
volitional control. Her fame throughout the Caucasus increased, breeding both
hostility and admiration. She had risen above the necessity of resorting to the
slow process of raps, and read people's states and gave them answers through her
own clairvoyance. She seemed able, she said, to see a cloud around people in
whose luminous substance their thoughts took visible form. The purely sporadic
phenomena were dying away.
Her illness at the end of her stay in Mingrelia has already been noted. A
psychic experience of unusual nature even for her, through which she passed
during this severe sickness, seems to have marked a definite epoch in her occult
development. She apparently acquired the ability from that time to step out of
her physical body, investigate distant scenes or events, and bring back reports
to her normal consciousness. Sometimes she felt herself as now one person, H. P.
Blavatsky, and again some one else. Returning to her own personality she could
remember herself as the other character, but while functioning as the other
person she could not remember herself as Madame Blavatsky. She later wrote of
these experiences: "I was in another far-off country, a totally different
individuality from myself, and had no connection at all with my actual life."24
The sickness, prostrated her and appears to have brought a crisis in her inner
life. She herself felt that she had barely escaped the fate that she afterwards
spoke of as befalling so many mediums. She wrote in a letter to a relative:
"The last vestige of my psycho-physical weakness is gone, to return no more. I
am cleansed and purified of that dreadful attraction to myself of stray spooks
and ethereal affinities. I am free, free, thanks to Those whom I now bless at
every hour of my life." (Her Guardians in Tibet.)25
Madame Jelihowsky writes too:
"After her extraordinary and protracted illness at Tiflis she seemed to defy and
subject the manifestations entirely to her will. In short, it is the firm belief
of all that there where a less strong nature would have been surely wrecked in
the struggle, her indomitable will found somehow or other the means of
subjecting the world of the invisibles-to the denizens of which she had ever
refused the name of 'spirits' and souls-to her own control."26
As a sequel to this experience her conception of a great and definite mission in
the world formulated itself before her vision. It is seen to provide the motive
for her abortive enterprise in Cairo in 1871; it is again seen to be operative
in her propagation of Theosophy in 1875. It will be considered more at length in
the discussion of her connection with American Spiritualism.
By 1871 her power in certain phases had been greatly enhanced. She was able,
merely by looking fixedly at objects, to set them in motion. In an illustrated
paper of the time there was a story of her by a gentleman, who met her with some
friends in a hotel at Alexandria. After dinner he engaged her in a long
discussion. Before them stood a little tea tray, on which the waiter had placed
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a bottle of liquor, some wine, a wine glass and a tumbler. As the gentleman
raised the glass to his lips it broke to pieces in his hands. Madame Blavatsky
laughed at the occurrence, remarking that she hated liquor and could hardly
tolerate those who drank. He knew the glass was thick and strong, but, to draw
her out, declared it must have been an accidental crumbling of a thin glass in
his grasp. "What do you bet I do not do it again?" she flashed at him. He then
half-filled another tumbler. In his own words:
"But no sooner had the glass touched my lips than I felt it shattered between my
fingers, and my hand bled, wounded by a broken piece in my instinctive act of
grasping the tumbler together when I felt myself losing hold of it."
"Entre les lèvres et la coupe, il y a quelquefois une grande distance," she
observed, and left the room, laughing in his face "most outrageously."27
Another gentleman, a Russian, who encountered her in Egypt, sent the most
enthusiastic letters to his friends about her wonders.
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