Gordon Strong - Lion of Light: The Spiritual Life of Madame Blavatsky

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Winston Churchill

A cholera plague raged through Europe on the night that Elena Petrovna Hahn was born. At her baptism, the robes of the hastily summoned priest caught fire. Such was the auspicious beginning to the life of one of the most extraordinary characters of the nineteenth century, one whose influence would last much longer than her comparatively short sojourn upon this Earth. The heavens chose 12th of August 1831 for her birth, in Ekaterinoslav, a district of the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. She was the child of a Colonel in the Russian Army, Peter Von Hahn, and his wife, Helena Andreyevna. The name Hahn is a patronymic form of Johannes and derives from hane, high German for rooster. The symbolism of this creature is of conceit, and sexual activity both qualities that would later be attributed to our subject, and not always fairly.

Her mother claimed the lineage of one of the oldest Empire families, a direct descendant, she said, of Grand Duke Rurik, the first ruler of Russia. It was perhaps inevitable that her mother should be a novelist, and Helenas sister Vera, also wrote occult fiction. The education of Helena, as she was soon to be called, came to be supervised by her maternal grandmother. This lady was a princess, her husband, the governor of Saratov. Of Helenas other relations, most prominent was her first cousin Sergei Witte, who later became prime minister of Russia in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.

Inevitably, such a privileged background would do much to determine the kind of childhood Helena would enjoy. What made this little girl different from her peers was the strength of her inner life. This quality would ensure that she would never be just a conventional member of the elite in Russian society, and her contacts with the other side also made her both sensitive and wilful. Much that terrified her as a child was propagated by her own imagination, and in later years her often morbid sensibility led to an inability to accept criticism, or even what might be termed sensible advice. She was idealistic, nave and often unworldly. That said, she commanded respect, and considering her capricious temperament, a great many people throughout her life were completely devoted to her. Few recollections exist of Helenas childhood, but this, from the pen of an unnamed aunt, is revealing:

She wasvery lively and highly gifted, full of humour, and most remarkably daring; she struck everyone by her self-willed and determined actionsHer restless and very nervous temperament, one that led her into the most unheard-of ungirlish mischiefher passionate love and curiosity for everything unknown and mysterious, weird and fantastic; and foremost of all, her craving for independence and freedom of action a craving that nothing and no one could control; all this, combined with an exuberance of imagination and a wonderful sensitiveness, ought to have warned her friends that she was an exceptional creature