The “glorious comedy” of Blavatsky’s career is just the beginning of Washington’s bemused but never contemptuous history of how the mysterious East was retailed to the credulous West. Her supposed mystic contacts with the Great White Brotherhood of Masters -an incorporeal pantheon rooted in the fantasy novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton begat Theosophy, a vague blend of occultism and Eastern religion. Theosophy, in turn, helped soften up the American mind for the revelations of more bizarre and sinister charismatic teachers in our day, such J.Z. Knight (channeler of Ramtha) and the fundamentalist flame-out David Koresh. But Blavatsky always poked fun at her “disagreeable bulky self”: she called the apparitions at her seances spooks," and when her fakery was exposed she would ‘fess up “with a wink and a chuckle.” As Washington says, “she didn’t give a hoot for anyone or anything.”
Directly or indirectly Blavatsky inspired generations of career gurus. In 1909. a pederastic Blavatskyite spotted 14-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti on a beach in India and declared him the Messiah. Krishnaniurti (1895-1986) later quit Theosophy: his paradoxical teaching that no one needed teachers made him the West’s star swami until the giggly Maharishi Mahesh Yogi recruited the Beatles (but not, as Washington claims, Bob Dylan). The shy, conflicted Krishnamurti’s opposite counterpart was the manic, Armagnacswilling G.I. Gurdjieff (1874?1949), a Greco-Armenian mystic given to totaling expensive cars and abusively dismissing disciples who, thinking it a test, kept coming back.
Washington wouldn’t trust these folks farther than he could teleport them. But he has a Dickensian affection for the energy with which they transformed their tenuous, often difficult lives into operatic spectacles-where walk-ons threatened to steal the show. A “Bishop” in one Theosophist sect smuggled cocaine in his crozier: caught cruising men’s rooms, he told cops he was looking for a friend from a previous life. Today’s New Age charlatans can’t be treated with Washington’s wry indulgence: people whose time and money they waste (to say no more) might be saved by muckraking outrage. But Blavatsky and company now dwell harmlessly in the Beyond, and doubtless view us with kindly detachment. No harm in our doing as much for them.
