The Scholar and the Seer

Could Rizal and Blavatsky Have Met?

I. Two Lodgers in London

In the summer of 1888 two of the more remarkable minds of the century were living a few miles apart in London. One was José Rizal, the twenty-seven-year-old Filipino physician, novelist, and reformer, whose Noli Me Tángere had been published in Berlin the year before and had made him a marked man in the eyes of the Spanish friars. The other was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, fifty-seven, Russian-born, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who was finishing the book she regarded as her life's work. No record shows that they ever met, and the question this essay asks is whether they could have, and what the asking teaches.

Rizal arrived in London in late May 1888 and took lodgings with the Beckett family at 37 Chalcot Crescent, a curving terrace of houses at the foot of Primrose Hill. He had come with a single purpose. Spanish accounts of the Philippines before the conquest described its people as barbarians whom Spain had civilized, and Rizal wanted to show from the earliest sources that the islands had possessed a culture, a commerce, and a literacy of their own. The source he chose was the Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas of Antonio de Morga, a Spanish official, first printed in Mexico in 1609 and rare enough by Rizal's day that he had to copy it by hand in the Reading Room of the British Museum. His annotated edition, with notes that answer Morga line by line, was published in Paris in 1890.

His most valuable friend in London was Reinhold Rost, the German orientalist who served as librarian of the India Office Library and was one of the leading philologists in the city. Rost was so impressed by the young Filipino that, by Rizal's own report, he called him una perla de hombre, a pearl of a man, and he is generally credited with smoothing Rizal's path into the Reading Room, which required a recommendation from a person of standing before a reader's ticket would be issued. Through Rost, Rizal also gained access to the scholarly circles in which Malay languages and Asian history were being studied seriously for the first time in English, and the Morga edition owes something to those conversations.

II. The Lady at Lansdowne Road

Blavatsky had moved to London in May 1887, and by the summer of 1888 she was living at 17 Lansdowne Road in Notting Hill, near Holland Park, some four miles west of Rizal's lodgings. Her household was a small community of disciples, and the two who mattered most for her work were Archibald Keightley and his uncle Bertram, who took her enormous, disordered manuscript of The Secret Doctrine in hand, typed it, divided it into volumes, and saw it through the press. The first volume appeared in October 1888 and the second at the end of the year, so the summer of 1888 was the season of proofs, corrections, and last additions.

The picture of Blavatsky working in the British Museum Reading Room is an attractive one, and the record gives it little support. She was gravely ill for much of her London period, heavy, short of breath, suffering from kidney disease, and she seldom left the house; she wrote at her desk from early morning, often for twelve hours or more, and received visitors in the evenings. Her own account of her sources was that many of her quotations came to her by clairvoyance, read in what she called the astral light, and the checking of references in libraries was done by others, the Keightleys among them. (The critic William Emmette Coleman later argued that a great many of her quotations had in fact been copied from a small number of nineteenth-century books, which is a different and less mysterious account of how they reached her desk.) If anyone from Lansdowne Road was in the Reading Room in July 1888, it was far more likely to be one of the Keightleys than Blavatsky herself.

Her week also had a fixed point that kept her at home. The Blavatsky Lodge, founded in 1887, met on Thursday evenings at her house, and the questions she answered there were later printed as Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge. One small irony of the geography is that in 1890, after Rizal had left London, she moved with the Theosophical headquarters to 19 Avenue Road in St John's Wood, only a short walk from Primrose Hill and the street where Rizal had lodged.

III. The Reading Room

The round Reading Room of the British Museum, opened in 1857 under its great blue-and-gold dome, was the intellectual crossroads of Victorian London. Karl Marx had written much of Capital at its desks, and in the 1880s its readers included novelists, revolutionaries, clergymen, cranks, and scholars from every corner of the empire. Rizal was one of its regular readers in the summer of 1888, arriving in the morning after his writing and correspondence and spending long hours over Morga and the other early chroniclers. A thirty-minute carriage ride or a brisk hour's walk would have brought anyone from Lansdowne Road to Bloomsbury.

So the question has to be put in its proper form. Could Rizal and Blavatsky have been in the Reading Room on the same day? It is possible, in the way that a great many things are possible. Is it likely? On the evidence just described, it is unlikely, because the Reading Room was part of Rizal's daily life and almost certainly not part of hers. The more plausible meeting point, if Rizal had wished to see her, would have been her own house, since the Blavatsky Lodge welcomed curious visitors on Thursday evenings, and a young colonial intellectual with an interest in Asian religion could have walked in with a letter of introduction.

An earlier draft of this essay proposed 18 July 1888 as the most likely day of a meeting, on the grounds that Blavatsky was preparing for a Theosophical gathering on 19 July. I have not found any record of a special gathering on that date, and I have to confess that the date was more a novelist's choice than a historian's. One detail does stand: 19 July 1888 fell on a Thursday, the regular evening of the lodge, which means that if Blavatsky was preparing for anything that week, she was preparing at home. A reader who enjoys imagining the two of them exchanging glances across the reading desks is free to do so, and so am I, provided we both remember that at that point we have crossed from history into fiction.

IV. God, Reason, and the Absolute

If the two had met, the subject most likely to draw them together was God. Rizal set out his religious convictions at greatest length four years after London, in the letters he exchanged in 1892 and 1893 with the Jesuit Pablo Pastells while he was in exile at Dapitan, on the coast of Mindanao. Pastells, the superior of the Jesuit mission in the Philippines, wrote to bring him back to the Church, and Rizal answered with courtesy and without yielding. He affirmed his belief in a Creator, infinite and beyond the reach of any human doctrine, known through reason, through the order of nature, and through conscience, and he refused to accept that any church held a monopoly on the truth about that Being. As the letters are often quoted, he also drew a sharp distinction between faith and superstition, comparing the two to flame and smoke, or to music and noise. I have not been able to check the Spanish of that phrase or the name "Plus Supra" that some writers attach to Rizal's God, and I would want both confirmed against the published correspondence before relying on them, though the substance of his position in the letters is not in doubt.

Rizal was also a Freemason. He was initiated in Madrid in 1883, in the lodge Acacia, and Masonry gave him a vocabulary for God as the Great Architect of the Universe, a Supreme Being honored without sectarian creed. That vocabulary lay close to the ground on which Theosophy stood. The first of the three fundamental propositions of The Secret Doctrine, published that very autumn of 1888, describes "an Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable Principle on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception." Blavatsky's Absolute is impersonal, a principle more than a person, and her cosmos unfolds through cycles and laws, hierarchies of beings, and a wisdom she claimed had been preserved by hidden masters in Asia.

The two minds would have agreed on a good deal. Both rejected clerical authority and religious superstition, both sought a truth larger than any one church, and both looked to Asia with respect at a time when Europe looked at it chiefly as a market or a colony. They would also have disagreed, and the disagreement would have been interesting. Rizal was a physician and a historian who trusted documents, experiments, and the slow labor of reform through education, while Blavatsky trusted visions, adepts, and a secret tradition no document could verify. An evening at Lansdowne Road might have produced either a friendship or a fierce argument, and knowing both of them a little from their writings, I suspect it would have produced both.

V. The Neighbor on Regent's Park Road

A third figure lived even closer to Rizal than Blavatsky did. Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator and co-author of The Communist Manifesto, had lived at 122 Regent's Park Road since 1870, and Chalcot Crescent opens off the same road, so that the two men lodged within a few minutes' walk of each other, on the same side of Primrose Hill. Marx had died in 1883, and Engels spent the 1880s editing the second and third volumes of Capital from his friend's chaotic manuscripts, receiving socialists from across Europe at his Sunday gatherings, and advising the movements that would become the parties of the next century.

A meeting between Rizal and Engels would have been one of the stranger encounters of the age, and there is no evidence it happened. Both men cared about justice and about peoples crushed by power, and both believed that history could be made to explain the present. Rizal, though, sought the reform of Spanish rule through education, legal equality, and representation, and he distrusted violent revolution almost to the end, while Engels expected the overthrow of the whole capitalist order by the working class. For part of that summer, in any case, the neighbor was not at home. In August and September 1888 Engels traveled to the United States and Canada with Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, his only visit to the New World, and he wrote home with an old man's delight about the energy of the Americans and with a sharp eye for the weakness of their socialist movement.

VI. The Young Man Who Did Meet Her

The question of whether a young Asian intellectual in London could have met Blavatsky in those years has, as it happens, a documented answer, though the young man was not Rizal. In September 1888, a few months after Rizal arrived, an eighteen-year-old law student from Porbandar named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi landed in London to read for the bar. In his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi recalls that toward the end of his second year two Theosophist brothers invited him to read the Bhagavad Gita with them, which shamed him because he had never read it in Sanskrit or in his own Gujarati, and that they later took him to the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced him to Madame Blavatsky and to Annie Besant, who had just joined the Society. He read Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy, and he said it stirred in him a desire to read more about Hinduism and freed him from the missionaries' claim that his own religion was mere superstition.

Gandhi's account shows how such a meeting would have happened, by introduction, at the lodge, through friends who were already members, and it also shows what such a meeting could do. Theosophy, for all its strangeness, sent a young Indian back to the scriptures of his own people with new respect for them, at a time when the empire taught him to despise them. A similar effect on Rizal is easy to imagine, since he was laboring in the same city to show that his own people had possessed a civilization before Spain, though Rizal's instrument was the historical document and Gandhi's, at that stage, was the spiritual book.

Rizal and Blavatsky never met, as far as the record shows, and Engels was on a ship to New York for part of that summer. The value of the what-if lies less in the meeting that did not happen than in what the asking reveals, which is a London where a Filipino reformer, a Russian seer, a German revolutionary, and an Indian law student could all be living within a few miles of one another, each working in a different way to unseat an authority that claimed to know the world better than they did. Rizal went on to be shot by a Spanish firing squad at Bagumbayan on 30 December 1896, and his death helped set the Philippine revolution alight. Blavatsky died in London in May 1891, Engels in 1895, and Gandhi lived to see India free. The Reading Room, which held so many of their contemporaries, closed to readers in 1997 when the British Library moved to St Pancras, and it is a fitting place to leave the four of them, in the imagination at least, at desks under the great dome, a few rows apart, each bent over a different book.