Defending the Old Lady
The TPH - USA and the Solovyov Letters
A commentary on The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky - Volume I
Edited by John Algeo, TPH-Wheaton, USA, 2003, 632 pp.
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Included in The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky - Volume I we can see nearly 20 letters which are said to be written by HPB, but whose originals never appeared, as the editor rightfully acknowledges.
They were obtained only from their publication by Mr. Vsevolod Sergueyevich Solovyov, as John Algeo indicates after the text of each of them.
Solovyov was a well-known enemy of Theosophical movement and of HPB's, personally. He made many false accusations against her, as Sylvia Cranston demonstrates in her admirable book HPB, The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky.1
In another important book -- Blavatsky and Her Teachers -- the English writer Jean Overton Fuller reports that Mr. Solovyov forged and published several letters, which he ascribed to HPB. In one of them, Solovyov makes HPB "confess" she "invented" the whole idea of the Masters.2
More about Mr. Solovyov's false charges against HPB can be read in a third well-known biography of the Old Lady, When Daylight Comes, by Howard Murphet.3 There we read -- p. 193 -- that Solovyov played the role of "a muckraking journalist looking for a good story at any cost to truth".
On the same page 193, Howard Murphet quotes Henry S. Olcott, the president-founder of the Theosophical Society. According to HSO, the fact that Solovyov's texts against HPB were published only after her death, which "made it safe for him to tell his falsehoods about her, shows him to be as heartless and contemptible, though fifty times more talented, than the Coulombs".4
Unfortunately, Mr. Algeo, who is known to be a careful linguist and scholar, failed to leave these letters unpublished. And failed even to mention that Mr. Solovyov, sole source of these texts, happens to be one of the bitterest enemies of HPB and of the theosophical movement in all times, and most likely forged these letters, completely or in part. On the contrary, Mr. Algeo seems to implicitly indicate to the reader that the letters are authentic. The very name of the Theosophical Publishing House appearing on the volume, and the fact that it is published as part of the Collected Writings of HPB give even more weight to the false impression that these letters should be taken as authentic.
Most of these letters "obtained" and "arranged" by Mr. Solovyov are addressed to Mr. A. N. Aksakoff. Besides the letters commented below, other letters included in Mr. Algeo's volume were obtained exclusively from Mr. Solovyov's "work". Among them we can see letters 11, 12, 17, 33, 45, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 69, 70, 72, 76, 85, 90 and 94.
Some of the most offensive Letters in the volume are 7, 12, 17, 33, 53, 69 and 76. But in several other "Solovyov letters" HPB appears as someone obsessed by money, a mean person, morally and intellectually limited to subjects of little importance.
Commentaries on some of the texts in Letters of H.P. Blavatsky - Volume I:
Letter 7 -- In this text HPB is made to offer her services to the Russian Secret Police. Apparently, its original can be examined even today, since it is said it is in some Public archives in Russia (Central State Archive of the October Revolution). But Mr. John Algeo did not have the time or was not interested in investigating who has forged such a text.
In the first lines of the document, HPB says that she and Nikifor Blavatsky "separated by mutual agreement several weeks after the wedding"(p.24). But in the penultimate paragraph (p.29) she says, flagrantly contradicting herself: "I was escaping not from Russia, but from an old hated husband, who had been imposed on me. . . ."
On page 26, upper half, there is more hatred. Now she says, or is made to say, that she has "an inborn hatred of the whole Catholic clergy". Well, we know that one of the basic conditions for an Initiate and even for a true aspirant is to harbor no hatred for any being. (Possibly including husbands and priests.)
On page 26, lower half, she says she is -- "Fully certain that I will be more than useful to my Motherland, which I love more than anything in the world, and to our Emperor, whom we all deify." So she did believe in a personal God, after all -- and God was the Emperor . . !? The text does not make sense.
On page 27, she appears to be proud of her "cunning", which happened to be "equal to that of a Red Indian".
On page 29, still in the Letter 7, she says: "I love Russia and am prepared to devote all my remaining life to her interests."
The authenticity of this letter is hardly above zero and its source should be traced. Judging from its content, it may have been produced by Mr. Solovyov, or by the Coulombs, and later given to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. I would like to know for certain whether its content in Russian language and autenticity of origin have been rightfully checked, as it does seem written or "adapted" by someone else.
Letter 8 -- It serves as a preparation for reading Letters 11 and 12.
Letters 11 and 12 -- She writes as if she were morally guilty of all kinds of undignified behaviour. One of the sentences in Letter 12, at page 49, says: "These are the bitter fruits of my youth devoted to Satan, his pomps and works!"
At page 47, Letter 12, she writes: "Though you have the right, like any honourable man, to despise me for my sad reputation in the past, you are so condescending as to write to me. . . . If I have any hope for the future it is only beyond the grave, when bright spirits shall help me to free myself from my sinful and impure envelope."(!)
There are many other sentences ascribed to HPB which are extremely hard to take as true if not ridiculously false.
On one hand, the letters 11, 12, 17 and others may be entire forgeries. On the other hand, false interpolations may have been included in their "transcriptions" made by Mr. Solovyov. Both from inner evidence and from the source of these letters, it is easy to conclude that they include many false sentences.
In her book Blavatsky and Her Teachers, Jean Overton Fuller correctly evaluates the false letter which was published as authentic by Mr. Algeo and included in his volume as Letter 11. Here HPB is made to talk about free love and to say that "there is no salvation" for her "but death".
(In 1999, I heard that such a letter would be published as part of the Collected Writings. Mr. Pedro Oliveira, a former International Secretary of the T.S. Adyar, told me that. At the time, I wrote to the USA-TPH asking about any continuation of the Collected Writings after the Volume XV - Cumulative Index. I had a response saying that no other volume was in preparation. In the year 2000, when I detected rumours questioning HPB's purity of life in the Brazilian Section of the TS, I wrote to Pedro Oliveira for clarification and he avoided the subject.)
Letter 17 -- A most undignified fabricated letter, in which the poor founder of the esoteric movement is made to say: "If you hear that the Blavatsky of many sins has perished, not in the bloom of years and beauty, by some curious death, and that she has dematerialized forever. . ."(page 71). And then she attacks her own family (page 72).
Letter 33 -- She is made to say: ". . . yet, there is only one thing I am seeking and struggling for -- that people should forget the former Blavatsky, and leave the new one alone. But it seems hard to achieve." And the text goes on like this.
Letter 53 -- HPB says, according to both Mr. Algeo and Mr. Solovyov: "I am ready to sell my soul for Spiritualism, but nobody will buy it, and I am living from hand to mouth . . ."(page 194)
Letter 69 -- HPB is made to say: "I really cannot, just because the devil got me into trouble in my youth, go and rip up my stomach now like a Japanese suicide . . ." And also: "My position is cheerless -- simply helpless. There is nothing left but to start for Australia and change my name forever." (page 260)
Letter 76 -- The founder of the theosophical movement is made to describe a scene in which she and other people torture a cat and cause the death of the animal by electrification(page 288), during 'an occult experience', among many other absurd statements.
O o o O o o O o o O
In the preface of this volume with "Letters of HPB", John Algeo scrupulously reveals minor aspects of his "Editorial Principles" on issues like References, Transliteration, Translations and Order.
But he fails to say that he includes several letters ascribed to HPB whose originals never appeared and whose would-be transcriptions were published only by an open liar -- as demonstrated by Sylvia Cranston, Howard Murphet and Jean Overton Fuller, among others. Not to mention Henry Olcott, who lived in those times.
From the very title of the volume -- The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky -- the reader is invited to take for granted that the Letters were authentically written by HPB. If such a material were to be included, a fair editorial approach would at the very least mention that the letters 7, 11, 12, 17 and others cannot be safely ascribed to HPB, and that most of them must have been forged or distorted by Mr. Vsevolod Sergueyevich Solovyov.
Note that these letters are all dated after 1870, when a letter from the Mahatmas, delivered to HPB's aunt, made it clear that HPB was already in full touch with them and a full disciple.5 Therefore no one could say that when HPB wrote these letters she was naive, had not been taken into discipleship properly, etc.
Of course, the members of the "Editorial Committee for the Letters of HPB" -- Dara Eklund, Daniel Caldwell, R. Elwood, Joy Mills, Nicholas Weeks -- may have some degree of responsibility with regard to the publication of these Letters. In a letter to me dated June 6th 2004, Mr. Algeo says that each member of the Editorial Commmittee "was sent all materials as they were prepared, and every member responded to these materials, without mentioning the matters of your concern."
Yet Dara Eklund had told me in a letter dated 17 May 2004:
My husband Nicholas Weeks had cautioned John Algeo about the Solovyov letters, but he made the final decision. . . .
Dara Eklund also sent me copy of an e-mail from John Algeo to her, written in May 2004 after receiving my first letter to him and to Dara. In the e-mail Algeo says:
The question of the reliability of Solovyov letters has already been broached to me by Leslie Price, so I have it in mind. I'll see whether I can get some general caveat into the next printing, and more particular notes on his particular failings into the next edition. I was of course aware that Solovyov (like others who have quoted or extracted HPB's letters) cannot be taken at face value, and there is a general statement about that in the volume. But because Boris included those letters in his collection I was not as critical about them as I probably should have been.
In this paragraph Mr. Algeo mentions Solovyov's "particular failings". According to the Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, "failing" means "the act or state of one who or that which fails". Therefore failings is not the word for what Mr. Solovyov did. He tried to do harm and happened to have a considerable success indeed. Even now his lies are publicized.
One could argue that most of these letters were translated by Boris de Zirkoff, who included them in his collection decades ago. True. But this does not mean that Zirkoff thought they were authentic. Boris published other false accusations and forged letters against HPB in Volume VI of HPB Collected Writings. But he did so clearly identifying the texts as forgeries, from their very titles, and included very frank commentaries by HPB herself on such libels. No ambiguity was possible. No reader could possibly think those forged texts were true.
Whereas Mr. Algeo silently adopted as true the attacks against HPB.
It is useless to discuss anyone's intentions -- but there is an oceanic distance between the two editorial treatments with regard to the attacks against the Old Lady.
O o o O o o O o o O
In a letter to Mr. John Algeo, dated 25th May 2004, I submitted to him some technical questions:
1) What proofs do you have that the Solovyov letters, whose originals never appeared, are true?
2) Why do you implicitly believe, as an editor, that Solovyov is a reliable historical source?
3) Who made the historical discovery that Henry S. Olcott, Jean Overton Fuller, Howard Murphet, Sylvia Cranston and so many other students are wrong, and Mr. Solovyov is, after all, a reliable source of documents concerning HP Blavatsky?
4) What are the scientific evidences that corroborate such a powerful discovery?
5) Or do you accept the evidences that Solovyov is a liar and a traitor to Truth?
6) But then, why publish his stuff as true with no warning?
7) Or rather, why publish it at all?
8) Who gave the letter ascribed to HPB and published as number 7, to the Russian Public Archives [and] where is it now?
9) You must have proofs or evidences that the originals of letter 7, now in these Public Archives, were not forged either by Mr. Solovyov or by Mr. and Mrs. Coulomb.
10) What are these proofs and evidences, please?
11) Has any expert in forgeries examined these "originals"?
12) Please remember that the last time an expert examined the so-called "proofs" against HPB, the Old Lady was found not guilty. HPB was found a victim of forgery, and the SPR, Society for Psychic Research, honestly made a public apology in April 1986, one hundred years after comdemning HPB on false evidence.6 Why not try a good expert in forgeries for the Letter 7, if it has not been done yet?"
My questions to Mr. Algeo have not been answered. Not a big surprise.
Meanwhile the international president of the Theosophical Society (Adyar), Mrs. Radha Burnier, honestly wrote to me about the issue. Mr. John Algeo happens to be the international vice-president of the Adyar Society. Trying to understand what was going on with the Adyar Society editorial policies, I had asked an explanation from Mrs. Burnier. She said, in a letter dated 24 June 2004:
I agree about the wisdom of including in The Letters of HPB published by TPH Wheaton the obviously spurious ones. You must ask an explanation, not from me (who have nothing to do with it, and have not been consulted) but from the Editorial Committee in the U.S.
It is a significant fact that Mrs. Radha stays away from these attacks against HPB.
In a letter to me dated 5 May 2004, one of the main HPB biographers, Jean Overton Fuller, admits, while commenting Mr. Algeo's editorial work: "It is very strange, Algeo being a Theosophist and indeed vice-president." In the same letter Jean says that the publication of the Solovyov letters as if they were authentic is something "really very damaging".
True, Mr. Algeo did accept, at least partially, that he made a mistake in publishing those Solovyov letters in the way he did. But this acceptance was made only privately.
And such a public mistake must be corrected in a public way, as I have requested from him in a letter dated 19 June 2004:
It would be obviously not fair that the misinformation would go to the many, and that the honest admission of the mistake would be made to one or two people only. You know that modern newspapers use to admit their mistakes. When any publication makes a mistake, the rule goes (and in most cases the law says) that the acknowledgment and correction should be as public as the misinformation publicized. As to the religious world, even the Pope John Paul II has admitted publically several of Vatican's past crimes against the Jews, the native peoples, during the Inquisition, etc.
Therefore I would like to make a suggestion. Would you please make a public note or statement (in Quest magazine, for instance), visible enough to be noticed, admitting that the Solovyov letters -- once fully examined the evidences available -- cannot be considered authentic, but quite the opposite, as they have been likely forged?
If you do that, I will not feel obliged to try to build an amount of general critical consciousness about the issue, so that in the second edition the wrongs are corrected.
I do not have the option of doing nothing about the issue, unless someone proves to me that Solovyov is a reliable source on theosophical history and on the life of HPB. The reason I can't remain inert is that I have a heartfelt ethical duty to practice a valiant defence of those who are unjustly attacked. (I believe you are familiar with this particular step of the Golden Stairs.)
It is true that Mr. Algeo talks about making corrections in the next edition. But I believe that there is no need for such a long delay in correcting the mistake done. Besides, such a future correction would leave the whole first edition in error.
Besides, there is no guarantee that a second edition will appear even in ten years' time, as Ms. Joy Mills, member of the Editorial Committee, acknowledges in a letter to me dated August 5th, 2004:
We appreciate your concern over any letters in the published work, The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky, that may be spurious. Corrections can only be made if and when there is a further edition of this first volume of the letters. Meanwhile, I assure you that we will take into consideration your several comments and objections.
It is a difficult-to-solve mathematical problem for me to understand why Ms. Joy Mills should come to the conclusion that "nothing can be done" before the "if and when" of a new edition occurs. The real question is: "even if there would be another edition soon, why wait?" I wrote on 9 July 2004 to Dara Eklund, with copy to Mr. Algeo:
Why waiting? Why should we circulate (...) falsehoods -- by action or by omission -- to the two or three thousand readers of the first edition during a long period of maybe seven to ten years or more? Judging by the duration of reprints in the case of the Collected Writings, it may well go to more than a decade. Besides, please consider the libraries involved and its long-term influence over different kinds of readers. You know that the first edition of any book has a much more lasting impact than the second one. Why should we have respect for the readers of the second edition only, which will appear, say, around the year 2010 or 2015, and ignore the rights of the readers of the first edition, who are equally entitled to be rightly informed about the nature of what they read? No. I do not think we should or could wait up to one decade to start correcting this grave error. The whole issue refers to the first edition. (....) Why not making an errata, a leaf with a rectification, which would circulate with each new volume to be sold? (...) It would be an (....) adequate and professional attitude on the part of Mr. John Algeo and his Committee.
And I added, in a later paragraph of the same letter:
. . . Once Mr. Algeo has a clear perception of the injustice made to HPB, he will be happy to acknowledge the mistake as soon as possible, as every able and experienced editor does worldwide nowadays. In previous letters I have already mentioned the apologies of the Vatican with regard to several of its crimes. I also mentioned the wise tradition of "errata" and editorial apologies which editors openly do whenever needed. Mr. Algeo would only deserve deep respect if he would take the initiative and go to the public (...) and make a clear, though moderate document to circulate together with the book. It would certainly fit our best editorial traditions. But I believe you will agree with me that a public mistake cannot be corrected with a secret amendment.
In a handwritten postcard dated 19 July 2004, Dara Eklund reiterates to me that in her view all editorial responsibility belongs to Mr. John Algeo and says that indeed "he would not need to wait ten years to do that" [i.e., the amendments].
It seems that Mr. Algeo has now a golden opportunity to accept the facts and redeem himself as an editor, while reducing at the same time the damage he has caused to Truth and to the esoteric movement.7
1 HPB, The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky, by Sylvia Cranston, edited by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Books, N.Y., USA, 1994, 648 pp. See Chapter 2 in Part 6, pp. 298-310.2 Blavatsky and Her Teachers, by Jean Overton Fuller, East-West Publications, 1988, 270 pp., see Chapter 67, pp. 186-188.
3 When Daylight Comes, by Howard Murphet, TPH, Quest Books, USA, copyright 1975, 277 pp. See Chapter 22, pp. 191-194.
4 The sentence comes from H.S. Olcott's Old Diary Leaves (TPH-India, 1972, volume III, p. 185). A longer quotation of his words about Solovyov or Solovioff: "Among the visitors of H.P.B. was that talented Russian Solovioff, whose book, which appeared long after dear H.P.B.'s death, made it safe for him to tell his falsehoods about her, shows him to be as heartless and contemptible, though fifty times more talented than the Coulombs."
5 See Letters From the Masters of the Wisdom, edited by C. Jinarajadasa, TPH, 1973, Second Series, Letter 1, by Mahatma K.H.
6 Mr. Algeo could indeed follow the honest example set by the SPR (Society of Psychic Research) and publically admit his mistakes. The SPR experience is described in the decisive book H.P. Blavatsky and the SPR, by Vernon Harrison (a distinguished member of the SPR), published by Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, California, USA, 1997, 78 pp.
7 For several other faults in the editorial work of The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky - Vol. I, see the review written by John Patrick Deveney, from New York, and published in the magazine Theosophical History, July 2004, pp. 31-36. Theosophical History is published in California by Mr. James Santucci, Department of Comparative Religion, California State University, P.O. Box 6868, Fullerton, CA 92834-6868, USA.
Contact and commentaries: Mr. Carlos Cardoso Aveline
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Email: carlosaveline@hotmail.com