Madame Blavatsky, The Esoteric She: A Sketch of Her Career

William Quan Judge · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 8 pages

Judge wrote this sketch for The Sun of New York, where it appeared on 26 September 1892 and drew widespread interest in H.P.B. from readers who knew her only as a controversy. It travelled unusually far for a piece of theosophical journalism: reprinted in the Platte County Argus of Nebraska that November under the title "A Woman's Noble Work", and as far away as Colombo, where The Buddhist carried it in its November and December issues simply as "Madame Blavatsky". The text here follows the edition in Echoes of the Orient, with Russian names revised against the biographical material in the Collected Writings.

A woman who kept the world talking about her, Judge begins — first her small childhood world and later two hemispheres — disputing about her, defending or assailing her character and motives, joining her enterprise or opposing it with might and main, and who in death was as much telegraphed about between two continents as an emperor, must have been a remarkable person. He then supplies the circumstances, and observes that hardly one of them was prosaic: her birth at Ekaterinoslav in 1831 amid the coffins and desolation of the cholera plague; the Hahn family, descended on one side from the crusader Count Rottenstern, who added a cock to his name after the bird saved his life from an assassin in his tent; and the baptism arranged in haste for so delicate a child, at which the whole assembled family stood holding lighted candles.

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