Ms. Meade’s biography of Madame Blavatsky is one of the few balanced efforts now available in print and, seemingly, the only one available as a eBook on Amazon.
It is refreshing to experience a biographer who weighs the good with the bad and comes down somewhere square in the middle, and if not, precisely, square then close enough to being so. HPB, as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky preferred to be called, has not made a biography a simple matter for her personal historians and those following the Spiritualist and Theosophical worlds.
That she suffered from deep-seated neuroses, which may well have been pathological, is difficult to deny. That she manufactured many of her so-called phenomena, most especially the Mahatma Letters as well as other ‘physical’ phenomena, is hardly beyond doubt—excepting for those devoted to the ‘cult of Blavatsky’, or ‘pope Blavatsky’. As well, many of her contemporary followers come off looking horribly gullible. Most notably Henry Olcott and Annie Besant—both were looking for a further purpose in life, or a greater meaning, and were drawn into the orbit of the Madame’s charisma and long-con.
The author, Ms. Meade, does not treat any of these adherents with anything less than sympathy, which is refreshing—though they hardly deserve it.
HPB was one of the most interesting Spiritualists of the 19th Century and she continues to have many followers to this day, but taking her as a whole—and she was a considerable whole—the woman probably had some level of genuine PSI ability, if you are predisposed to believe in such matters, but she was also a Spiritual Grifter, a drama queen, emotionally unstable, an inveterate liar, and an emotional toxic dump. This, however, seems to be the norm, rather than the exception, for ‘sensitives’. It is unclear whether or not this is an explanation of their behavior or an excuse for. The reader, as always, will have to make up their own mind about this.
This was one of the best biographies available out there on the life of HPB.
As a biography it deserves 5 stars, but the Kindle edition of the book has two serious flaws.
1. The endnote references are not activated.
2. The font cannot be changed, so the reader is stuck with the publisher font.
As a result this book, eBook, gets 4 out of 5 stars.
Still, taking the good with the bad, this biography is highly recommended for readers interested in the life of HPB and the world of 19th Century Spiritualism, as well as those readers who enjoy the world of gnostic dementia.
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