Story
Inspired by real events, this film is about the famous Ukrainian-Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky and her friend and partner, New York journalist Henry Olcott. Helena has been to Tibet and beyond, but claims she was sent to New York by two Hindu teachers to investigate the spiritualist craze that is sweeping the US.
Do the dead return to the living in ghostly apparitions?
Is this a mass hysteria following the enormous losses of the Civil War?
Or something else...?
Henry has been doing some investigating of his own. He yearns to connect with his dead wife. Helena believes that the dead don’t often revisit the living. “They have better things to do.” But she is on a mission to understand consciousness, life on earth and beyond. Henry is immediately beguiled. Sensing that she is special, he sets her up in a New York apartment full of exotic artifacts from her trips. Together, he claims, they will do great things.
Helena and Henry visit The Eddys, a family of mediums in Vermont. The most famous is William, who seems to make dead relatives appear in ghostly emanations. Helena feels a strange attraction to William but soon discovers that a pseudo-scientist, Dr. George Beard, plans to use high voltage electric jolts to electrocute him and prove that his “spirit" visitors are produced by cheap theatrical tricks.
Helena turns the tables on Beard, who electrocutes himself instead. Helena guides the traumatized William to another realm where they discover that they share a past life. This new self-knowledge brings serenity to William, and leads Helena to a fuller understanding of karma and reincarnation.
Henry realizes that he has much to learn. He decides to go to India and study with spiritual masters. “Come with me,” he pleads. Helena, torn by her desire to return to India and her teachers’ admonitions to stay in the U.S., makes a snap decision: disguised as his man servant, she joins Henry on the ship to Ceylon.
Together they will found an esoteric religious movement, embraced by the likes of William Butler Yeats, Thomas Edison, Wassily Kandinsky and many other luminaries — the Theosophical Society. But that’s another story...
Key Characters
Helena Blavatsky, also known as Jack, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and HPB, is in her early 40s and has piercing blue eyes. Impetuous and imperious at times, she can be exuberant, explosive, sometimes with the candor of a child. Generous to a fault, she has a strong sense of justice. Helena sometimes cross-dresses, has an ambiguous sexual identity, and often smokes. She wants to be well-known, but not out of personal vanity or a desire for wealth. Her quest is to enlighten the western world. She has a brilliant mind, practices automatic writing, and is psychic.She seeks to understand the nature of consciousness and to share that with others.
Henry Olcott is a renaissance man: a lawyer, agronomist and scientist, but now a newspaper reporter seeking the “facts.” He is also a drinker, who appreciates beautiful women and carnal pleasures. He has a zany side, at odds with his buttoned-down appearance, that he slowly allows to emerge. By the end of our story he looks like an Eastern mystic, growing a long beard, wearing sandals and a tunic. He is initially attracted to spiritualism in part by the hope of reconnecting with his dead wife. Later in life he will become a magnetic healer.
William Eddy, the most famous of the Eddy children and the lead medium of the family, is in his 30s. A troubled soul, he was abused in childhood by his father. He is capable of going into deep trances and making marvelous phenomena happen. Unless he is faking it.
George Beard, a middle-aged physician, was one of the first to use electricity in treatment of nervous disorders. He is precise, well-groomed and manicured. Contemptuous of anything “supernatural,” he initially hides his contempt and malice behind a suave exterior. Henry calls him “the electric eel.”