#theosophy

That same year, the Madras Christian Collective (fact check this, it could be Collective or College) would publish a scathing expose. The contents were largely based on correspondences between Blavatsky and Emma Coulomb, a former accomplice in many of Blavatsky’s scams, now turned traitor. The details of the so-called “Coulomb Affair” are hotly contested, but the end result was strong, public evidence that Blavatsky was a huckster who knowingly falsified her supernatural abilities. I could spend pages cataloging her parlor tricks. Most of them involved bribing servants to hide notes ahead of time, so they could be dramatically revealed –as if summoned from thin air– by the mark. And shock of all shocks: Koot Humi wasn’t real. He was a fiction. 

“The esoteric offers a truth to the spirit.”

Before rising from its ashes, the phoenix was pain and fire.