Faith, Fakery, and Eternal Truth: Searching for Mystical Masters Among Shadows and Elephants
by Edward Hower
Leap Frog Press 2002
(originally appeared in Hyde Park Review of Books)

Nineteenth century America was a place of fervent spiritual experimentation. The evangelistic Second Great Revival spawned newly theatrical representations of The Truth. A fascination with death and the dead raised Edgar Allen Poe to huge popular success. Thoreau and the Transcendentalists encouraged free-thinkers to seek the divine without recourse to the orthodoxy of traditional religions. Spirit mediums and séances enjoyed a vogue in Victorian era parlors, the existence of spectral forces no less plausible than electromagnetism or photography. From economics to mechanization to social reform, new worlds were being made every day. A bridge to the Other Side seemed to many both logical and inevitable. Into this milieu stepped Helena Petrovna "Madame" Blavatsky, a Russian spiritualist who set up shop in Manhattan in 1873 to propound Theosophy, a house blend of Hindu mysticism, Jewish Kabalah, Neo-Platonism, and Egyptian mummery that endures to this day.

In Shadows and Elephants, Edward Hower takes the life of Madame Blavatsky as the point of departure for an exploration of the complex interrelationships of faith, chicanery, and delusion. Like Madame Blavatsky, Hower's Madame Irena Milanova makes free use of parlor tricks to bolster the credibility of her contacts with the spirit world. On first introduction, she appears little more than a con artist; when she joins forces with a well-known journalist and investigator of the occult, it is natural to assume that she hopes to exploit his credulity to advance her business.

Based on Civil War hero Colonel Henry Olcott, Captain Ben Blackburn brings spooks of his own to the partnership. While leading the investigation of the Lincoln assassination some years earlier, he learned of a well-intentioned young woman named Mary Surratt who had allowed John Wilkes Booth to stay at her boarding house. Assuring the woman of mercy if she should confess all, Blackburn is horrified when she is hanged nonetheless. Haunted by her memory, he is consumed ever after with the search for scientific insight into the spirit world, and perhaps for absolution as well.

Following a hashish-enhanced evening of visions in Irena's tenement lair, Ben invites her to join his household and the two establish a salon that draws the cream of New York society, or at least its more impressionable clots. Encouraged by their early success and driven by millenarian fervor, Ben and Irene spearhead the foundation of the Alexandrian Society, a group devoted to investigating and validating "the secret knowledge of the ancients." Almost immediately the pair are visited by a less welcome apparition: a skeleton from Irena's closet with evidence of her scandalous past. Irena manipulates Ben into paying off the blackmailer, somehow without damaging his faith in her; the reader is less generous, and takes this as conclusive evidence of her charlatanism.

To this point, Shadows and Elephants has been long on the former and short on the latter. This changes dramatically when Ben and Irena relocate to India "in search of holy sages and sacred sorcerers, ancient texts and antique temples." Hower's previous works include The Pomegranate Princess, a collection of Indian folk tales, and his affinity for the land and its traditions bring new lyricism to the story. Far from the stock settings of Hower's historical New York, his Indian subcontinent is rich in color and detail, from the poverty-stricken villages of inner Ceylon to the grand estates of the maharajahs, where a long-disused billiards table grows thick grass that nestles the ivory balls like Easter eggs, and larking Victorian guests combine the earnest gullibility of children at a haunted house with the gossipy lassitude of a Somerset Maugham hunting party.

Here the search for truth takes on many different forms. For the Victorians, it is a parlor game on the order of a Ouija board, complete with "materialized" letters, trinkets, and personally embroidered handkerchiefs. For the Indians, the spiritual revival is interwoven with rising nationalism and resistance to the Raj. For a few opportunistic Ceylonese, the crusade is merely a vehicle for graft. Although Captain Blackburn sees himself as a tireless worker serving a larger cause, his ego proves highly susceptible to his growing renown as a spiritual leader. Only Irena's motives remain elusive; for all her fraud and deceit, she gains little from her efforts but the opportunity to perpetuate them, remaining in the shadows as Ben's figure looms ever larger.

Indeed, for all the zeal exhibited by Ben and his followers, it is Irena whose hunger for spiritual fulfillment is felt most acutely. Walking the streets of Ceylon, she wrestles with a crisis later recorded in her journal: "Though I love the island's beauty, I find no yogis or mystics to learn from here. I see no proofs of the Masters' purpose for my life, no miracles to validate Their watch over me. I feel adrift, an empty shell, deprived of my powers to amaze myself or others, unable to bring myself relief from the ever-advancing awareness of my human inadequacy ... "Never have I felt so close to the essence of humanity; never have I felt so alone." It becomes clear that the fraudulence of her methods does not belie the genuineness of her faith, and that few in this novel or the world outside are qualified to cast the first stone.

Shadows and Elephants covers a lot of ground, and it feels at times along the way as if Hower has lost the forest for the trees. The Mary Surratt theme disappears for long stretches until needed again, while a subplot involving Irena's involvement with Russian espionage in the Great Game remains serves only to provide her with the opportunity to write dispatches for the reader's edification. The distinction between Irena's masters Moreya and Ku-huri is at times confusing and can seem arbitrary. But these are minor points. " 'I was invited to dream such dreams,' [Captain Blackburn] said. 'And I have no intention of condemning the woman who gave them to me!'"