OVERVIEW

Inspired by real events, our film is about Helena Blavatsky, a Ukrainian mystic who arrives in New York in 1874 with nothing but her psychic gifts, a propensity to cross-dress, and a mission from her mentors to investigate the spiritualist craze sweeping across America. There she meets her soulmate, the journalist Henry Olcott. Together they investigate mediums and ghostly apparitions, and wind up launching their own spiritual movement that influenced people from Gandhi and Sherlock Holmes
to Elvis Presley and The Beatles.

SYNOPSIS

Journalist Henry Olcott yearns to connect with his dead wife and hopes a psychic medium will bring her back to life. Helena Blavatsky believes that the dead don’t often revisit the living. “They have better things to do.” She is on a mission to understand consciousness, life on earth and beyond. Henry is immediately beguiled. Sensing that she has special powers, he is determined to make her famous, and sets her up in a New York apartment full of exotic artifacts. Together, he claims, they will do great things.

Helena and Henry investigate The Eddys, a family of mediums in Vermont. The most famous is William, who claims to make dead relatives appear in ghostly emanations. Helena feels a strange attraction to William but soon discovers that a pseudo-scientist, Dr. George Beard, plans to use high voltage electric jolts to electrocute him and prove that his “spirit" visitors are produced by cheap theatrical tricks.

Beard and his sidekick electrocute themselves instead, while Helena guides the traumatized William to another realm where they discover that they share a past life. This new self-knowledge brings serenity to William, and leads Helena to a fuller understanding of karma and reincarnation.

Henry realizes that he has much to learn to be Helena's equal. He decides to go to India and study with the spiritual masters. “Come with me,” he pleads. Helena, torn by her desire to return to India and her teachers’ admonitions to stay in the U.S., makes a snap decision: disguised as Henry's man servant, she joins Henry on the ship to Ceylon, where they invite people to join their new philosophy and spiritual movement.

THEIR LEGACY: Helena and Henry found Theosophy, an esoteric spiritual movement, dedicated to universal brotherhood and freedom of thought, embraced by the likes of William Butler Yeats, Thomas Edison, Wassily Kandinsky and many other luminaries — the Theosophical Society. But that’s another story...