Marion Meade, one of her most dispassionate biographers, wrote that during her lifetime people across the globe furiously debated whether she was “a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three.” Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat, with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin (in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son) and an apostle of asceticism (she smoked up to two hundred cigarettes a day and swore like a soldier). Meade wrote, “She weighed more than other people, ate more, smoked more, swore more, and visualized heaven and earth in terms that dwarfed any previous conception.” The poet William Butler Yeats, who fell under her spell, described her as “the most human person alive.”
As she traveled to America and Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, she gathered followers who were mesmerized by her odd charms and Gothic appetites and, what's more, by her powers to seemingly levitate objects and speak with the dead. The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed. George Bernard Shaw wrote that perhaps never be fore had so many people been “addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like.”
The new powers of science to harness invisible forces often made these beliefs seem more credible, not less. If phonographs could capture human voices, and if telegraphs could send messages from one continent to the other, then why couldn't science eventually peel back the Other World? In 1882, some of England's most distinguished scientists formed the Society for Psychical Research. Members soon included a prime minister and Nobel Prize laureates, as well as Alfred Tennyson, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. Conan Doyle, who in Sherlock Holmes had created the embodiment of the rationalist mind, spent years trying to confirm the existence of fairies and sprites. “I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved,” Conan Doyle once declared.
While Madame Blavatsky continued to practice the arts of a medium, she gradually turned her attention to more ambitious psychic frontiers. Claiming that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan mahatmas, she tried to give birth to a new religion called Theosophy, or “wisdom of the gods.” It drew heavily on occult teachings and Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, and for many Westerners it came to repre sent a kind of counterculture, replete with vegetarianism. As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in
Some Theosophists, taking their heresy even further, became Buddhists and aligned themselves with religious leaders in India and Ceylon who opposed colonial rule. Among these Theosophists was Fawcett's older brother, Edward, to whom Percy had always looked up. A hulking mountain climber who wore a gold monocle, Edward, who had been a child prodigy and published an epic poem at the age of thirteen, helped Blavatsky research and write her 1893 magnum opus,
The ceremony commenced at about 8:30 p.m., in the
On another occasion, according to family members, Percy Fawcett, apparently inspired by his brother, took the Pansil as well-an act that, for a colonial military officer who was supposed to be suppressing Buddhists and promoting Christianity on the island, was more seditious. In
Now, though, the tension merely fueled his fascination with explorers like Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone, who had been esteemed by Victorian society, even worshipped by it, and yet were able to live outside it. Fawcett devoured accounts of their adventures in the penny presses, which were being churned out by new steam-powered printing machines. In 1853, Burton, disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, had managed to sneak into Mecca. Four years later, in the race to find the source of the Nile, John Speke had gone nearly blind from an infection and almost deaf from stabbing a beetle that was boring into his ear canal. In the late 1860s, the missionary David Livingstone, also searching for the Nile's source, vanished into the heart of Africa, and in January 1871, Henry Morton Stanley set out to find him, vowing, “No living man… shall stop me. Only death can prevent me.” Incredibly, ten months later, Stanley succeeded, famously greeting him, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Livingstone, intent on continuing his search, refused to return with him.
Suffering from a clot in his artery, disoriented, bleeding internally, and hungry, he died in northeast Zambia in 1873; in his last moments, he had been kneeling in prayer. His heart, as he requested, was buried there, while the rest of his body was carried by his followers across the continent, borne aloft as if he were a saint, and transported back to England, where throngs of people paid tribute to him at Westminster Abbey.
Fawcett later became friendly with the novelist who most vividly conjured up this world of the Victorian adventurer-savant: Sir Henry Rider Haggard. In 1885, Haggard published
Yet Fawcett did not have to look so far to see his desires spilled on the page. After abandoning Theosophy, Fawcett's older brother, Edward, remade himself into a popular adventure novelist who for a time was hailed as the English answer to Jules Verne. In 1894, he published
It was Edward's next novel, however, that most acutely reflected his younger brother's private fantasies-and, in many ways, chillingly foretold Percy's future. Called
