The Real People
Helena Blavatsky
A woman of power with a special mission
Helena was born in Ukraine into a family of minor Russian nobility. She rebelled against formal teaching and read voraciously. Even as a child, she had psychic abilities. She left Russia in 1849, at age 17, in a bold escape from her marriage to a 40-year-old husband. She traveled around the world, often on her own and disguised as a man, and absorbed the ancient spiritual traditions of Egypt, India and Tibet.
She viewed her destiny as bringing the “secret doctrine,” a body of knowledge she also called occultism, Brahma Vidya, wisdom religion and Divine Magic, to a materialistic yet psychically fertile western world.
Eventually landing in New York, at the instruction of unseen (except to her) spiritual masters, she drew together a circle of admirers and met Henry Olcott in the tiny town of Chittenden, Vermont where a family of mediums attracted spiritualists–people who wanted to reconnect with their departed loved ones. Rejecting spiritualism, Helena and Henry joined forces and invented a new movement, called Theosophy, which believed in the spiritual unity of all living things, universal brotherhood, and warned that "there is no religion higher than truth."
Henry Olcott
A former lawyer and journalist looking for answers
By the 1870s, Henry Steel Olcott, a retired colonel, had shifted his focus from corruption in naval yards during the Civil War to the study of mediumistic phenomena. He launched his career as Agriculture Editor for the New York Tribune, but made his name covering John Brown’s execution.
After the war, he investigated government fraud and built a successful legal practice in customs and insurance, moonlighting as a lobbyist. He was also the lead investigator in the alleged conspiracy surrounding Lincoln’s assassination and spent sleepless nights working on the case.
He made two visits to Chittenden in 1874, attending seances and witnessing materializations of “spirit forms” of all shapes and sizes. It was during his second trip that he met Helena Blavatsky. They took an apartment together in New York, called The Lamasery, full of exotic objects from Helena's travels and formed the Theosophical Society, with headquarters in New York and India, where Henry became a revered defender of Hindu and Native traditions and spoke out against British rule.
William Eddy
A troubled medium haunted by his past
William Eddy was born in Weston, Vermont in 1833. At age 13, he and his family moved to Chittenden, a township with fewer than 800 people at the western edge of the Green Mountains.
His mother Julia Ann was psychic, able to foretell the future and communicate with the dead. Her farmer husband scorned his wife's powers. But when he realized that their first son, William, had inherited her powers, and the other children to a lesser degree, he realized the commercial potential, and took the kids on the road to perform magic shows. Apparently he was a violent man and abused the children, William particularly. By the time both parents died, William had become one of the most famous mediums in the country. People traveled far and wide to witness the "phenomena" that he and his siblings created at their little farm house in Chittenden, Vermont.
George Beard
A cynical scientist intent on exposing the Eddys as frauds.
Dr. George Miller Beard graduated from Yale College and studied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. After serving in the Civil War, he established a New York City practice, specializing in nervous diseases. He was one of the first to experiment with electricity as a stimulant, and used “central galvanization” to treat depression.
In 1874, he visited the Eddy farm to “observe” a séance and determined that "with just a few dollars' worth of drapery and basic costumes, he could easily replicate all of the brothers' "spirit materializations." He stated that the senses can't be trusted in a dark room, and that trances, mind-reading, and mediumship have physiological and psychological explanations.
Henry and Helena feuded with him publicly in open letters to newspapers, defending the Eddy brothers. This public feud elevated their stature among occultists and spiritualists, and helped increase the popularity of the Theosophical movement.