In 1870 estimates of spiritualists ran as high as eleven million, almost a third of the US population, many of them desperate to know what happened after death. In parlors and farmhouses they consulted mediums and attended séances to find out.

By 1874, the Eddy family’s seances in Chittenden were famous, their farm a pilgrimage site for just about anyone interested in contact with the dead. Henry Olcott made two visits that year, the second lasting more than two months, and published his findings in a major newspaper, The New York Graphic. He witnessed many manifestations and heard music played by disembodied hands. He also obtained copies of what he called spirit writing.

Spirits of the dead rarely return or communicate with the living, claimed Helena Blavatsky, who also attended séances in Chittenden and met Henry Olcott there. Instead, she said, the materializations were “usually the astral body or double of the medium or someone present.” In other words, astral projection. A medium like William Eddy was a passive vehicle, she said. His mind was attracted by the “astral light,” his body in a trance.

Today, between 8 and 20 percent of people claim to have had an out-of-body experience at some point — the sense that consciousness, spirit, or the "astral body" is leaving the physical body.

When someone dies, according to Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, life, the physical body and the astral body separate and vanish. But the essential being awaits reincarnation in the Kama-Loka, an astral realm with no boundary, sometimes known in mythology as Hades.

Nearer to the material plane, elementals are also waiting. They are fluidic astral phantoms, formless entities with no sense of morality, attracted to mediums, hoping to “live” again by proxy, and assuming different shapes with the help of sensitive individuals or groups. For a short period they experience a vicarious existence, speaking, even acting through their human hosts.

Some elementals don’t know what they are talking about, Helena warned, but “others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil.”

Karma is destiny, an enveloping web that each person weaves over a lifetime. People plan and create their own, good and bad, and the Law of Karma adjusts the effects.

Helena Blavatsky sometimes described it as the Law of Retribution, others call it the law of cause and effect. If someone is suffering, choosing not to help when possible is bad karma. In the end, you’re really hurting yourself.

Karma can come instantly, later in life, or after reincarnation into another life entirely. It also determines when and how you come back, thus affecting future existence. Good intent and good deeds create good karma and better rebirth.

Over time, the word has generally come to mean “what goes around comes around.”

The idea that human beings live many lives before reaching perfection has been around for centuries. Helena called it metempsychosis. It’s also known as reincarnation, rebirth, and transmigration.

In popular thought of the 19th century, transmigration suggested that a human being could regress to a lower form from life to life. But according to Theosophy, “once a human being, always a human being.”

The purpose of life is spiritual emancipation, said Helena, and the soul reincarnates according to the Law of Karma.

In Woman from Another World, our film version of what happened in Vermont, Helena and William Eddy are karmically linked. To save him she must take him into a past life — their time together before the French Revolution — to heal an ancient wound.