Meryl Ann Butler: Thanks for visiting with OpEdNews, Greg. Your new book, "Into the Mystic: From Spiritualism to Theosophy in the Gilded Age" focuses on Helena Blavatsky. She is a fascinating figure, I first discovered her in the 1970s. How did you first become interested in her and her story?
Greg Guma: I moved to southern Vermont right after graduating from Syracuse University in 1968, and soon started working for a daily newspaper in Bennington. But I was also a part of the counterculture, looking for new ways to see and be in the world. Living above what was called a "metaphysical bookstore," I became friends with the owner, who eventually gave me The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky's two volume synthesis of philosophy, science and religion.
Greg's apartment over the former metaphysical bookstore, later the Gingerbread House.
(Image by Greg Guma) Details DMCA
At first I found it difficult and obscure. But I noticed that it had been published in 1888, the same year as a silver dollar my father had given me years earlier. I carried it in my pocket for luck.
And there was more. 1888 was also the publication date of a massive old book that had mysteriously found its way onto a bookshelf in my apartment. This one was called The Great Cryptogram, an infamous investigation by Ignatius Donnelly into a theory that William Shakespeare didn't write the famous plays. Decades later, I made 1888 a setting for my novel Dons of Time, a sci fi novel that actually transports the hero back to London where he falls in love with Annie Besant and befriends Ignatius Donnally while hunting for Jack the Ripper.
Already sensitive to synchronicity--"parallelism of time and meaning between and psychophysical events," as I describe it one of my new books--I decided to find out more.
MAB: Yes, synchronicity is always a good sign!
GG: One of my early discoveries was that Blavatsky had met Henry Olcott in Vermont 100 years earlier, and that meeting led directly to their founding of the Theosophical movement in New York. That movement fueled the birth of what we now call New Age thought, influencing spiritual leaders, extraordinary political figures, and revolutionary artists.
Both Helena and Henry had been attracted to the spiritualist phenomena produced by William Eddy, a medium living in Chittenden, a small town in central Vermont, less than two hours from where I lived. Eventually, I visited the town, got inside the house that once hosted so many visitors for seances, and interviewed elderly residents who met William Eddy and his brother Horatio before they died.
I also collected details about the lives of the Eddys, Helena and Henry, and began to publish what I discovered in 1975, in Public Occurrences, a magazine I had begun to publish.
Over several years, I further developed the story, published expanded versions, including one published in Fate, then a leading national magazine about paranormal phenomena.
By then, however, I felt that a better way to continue exploring the meaning of the events in Vermont and the ideas of Blavatsky and Olcott was to approach it as a historical novel.
That decision led to Spirits of Desire, my first novel, originally written in the 1980s but only published in 2004. It told the remarkable "origin story" through multiple points of view Helena and Henry, but also Theodore Noyes, physician son of the founder of the utopian Oneida community in upstate New York, and Hiram Baird, a wealthy older resident of Chittenden.
One of my new books, Into the Mystic, revisits the events, exploring how interest in spiritualism led to the Theosophical movement and providing more context both for what exactly happened in Vermont and how Helena Blavatsky explained it. I'm also working with a filmmaker, Nora Jacobson, to turn this remarkable tale into a dramatic film.
MAB: Wow, it sounds like it will make a fabulous film! Can you share one or two of the most fascinating or profound things you found out while researching this?
GG: That's a big question. I was raised in a Catholic family, but by the 1970s I was studying and practicing Buddhism. So, new knowledge was coming from multiple sources. Blavatsky certainly offered fresh answers to questions about ghosts and reincarnation.
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