THE MESMERIST
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Whatever else she was, Blavatsky wasn’t a dreary old drudge. But that’s how she comes off in Ara Watson’s pedestrian play The Mesmerist, which ineffectually dramatizes Hodgson’s 1884 investigation of Blavatsky. Watson simply fritters away one of the most interesting incidents in the long, scandal-ridden history of occultism: Blavatsky’s story has the intriguing potential to be a mystery about mysteries.
Blavatsky’s tragedy is a classic one: a gifted leader falls because she succumbs to the pressures of her position. Having established herself on the basis of her presumed psychic abilities, Blavatsky found herself forced to keep making more “miracles” to hold onto her fickle following. In India in the early 1880s, she announced her communication with master teachers on the astral plane. But Blavatsky’s “Mahatma letters” were exposed as a hoax by Hodgson, a young researcher from the Society for Psychical Research in London who extracted from Blavatsky’s assistant a confession that she had helped Blavatsky forge the letters. The scandal was especially painful for Henry Olcott, Blavatsky’s disciple and partner, who learned that she had personally mocked his gullibility; he expelled his former teacher and took over the Theosophical Society from her.
