Madame Blavatsky’s Dog and the Current Crisis

Monday my sister and I had lunch in Philadelphia with a colleague of mine named Bert. We met at the White Dog Cafe on Sansom Street, amid the University of Pennsylvania in a block that was originally a row of brownstone residences. During the early months of 1875, Madame Blavatsky lived in the house that is now the White Dog Cafe.

During her time on Sansom Street, Madame Blavatsky got an infected leg, and the doctors talked of amputation. “Fancy my leg going to the spirit land before me!” she said, and waved the doctors away.

In place of amputation, Madame Blavatsky treated herself by sleeping with a white dog lying over her leg. Given the state of medicine in 1875, the dog was as good an option as anything else, and Madame Blavatsky recovered. She hailed the experience as a transformation, and in September she founded the Theosophical Society.

The dog cure was not so unusual for Madame Blavatsky. She also performed levitation, clairvoyance, telepathy, and materialization (i.e., materializing objects out of empty space).

Where are the great masters of the past when we really need them? The very day we were lunching in Philadelphia, only a few hours’ drive away in Washington the economic masters of the present day were administering their own attempts at levitation and materialization.

My friend Bert is a business academician and lecturer and author. Of course we asked her what she thought.

“No one really knows how deep this is,” she said. “It will take a long time to fix this,” she said. “It really is an option to do nothing and see how things shake down, and then figure out what to do,” she said. “We have become a debtor nation,” she said, “all the way down to the family level.”

How can you argue with any of this?

No one knows if the 700-billion-dollar figure is the right amount for a federal rescue plan: it is a guess. It seems true to me that it will take longer than one hurried weekend to fix something as broken and complicated as the global economy. Doing nothing is always an option—although it galls people who think that doing anything, anything at all, in an emergency is better than doing nothing.

As for being a debtor nation from top to bottom—well gee, the levitators in Washington don’t exactly want to say this, but they are saying it endlessly: If Congress doesn’t pass this bill, the bankers won’t grant credit, and—to give a concrete example—the home-theatre installation companies won’t be able to borrow money to buy huge flat-screen televisions to sell to people on credit, and they won’t be able to borrow money to meet their payroll and pay you, the average home-theatre installer, and so you won’t be able to make your payments on the planer and band saw you bought when you went to the hardware store for nails and they told you you could get 10 per cent off if you put it on the new credit card they handed you as you walked in the door.

It sounds like levitation is what we need, and if the white dog worked for Madame Blavatsky, maybe the policy geniuses in Washington can get one more dance out of the old girl yet.

Maybe.

If  levitation doesn’t work, we might have to consider our last desperate option: the way of wisdom and virtue.

Surely things will not come to such a sorry pass as that. But if they do, here are words from Madame Blavatsky to get us started:

“Behold the truth before you: A clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, an eager intellect, an unveiled spiritual perception, a brotherliness for one’s co-disciple, a readiness to give and receive advice and instruction, a courageous endurance of personal injustice, a brave declaration of principles, a valiant defense of those who are unjustly attacked, and a constant eye to the ideal of human progression and perfection—these are the golden stairs up the steps of which the learner may climb to the temple of divine wisdom.”