Helena Blavatsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Helena Blavatsky preferred to be known by three letters: HPB. The sobriquet came from her friend Henry Steel Olcott, and it stuck to a woman who spoke Russian, Georgian, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. She wore loose robes and many rings, smoked cigarettes constantly, and at times smoked hashish. One associate, Mabel Collins, said she had a greater command of bad language and a worse temper than Collins had thought possible in one person. She was born into an aristocratic family in Yekaterinoslav, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1831, and she died of influenza in 1891. In between, she co-founded the Theosophical Society and became the primary founder of Theosophy as a belief system. She claimed to have crossed the Americas, India, and Tibet, to have been trained by hidden spiritual adepts, and to have translated texts in a language called Senzar. Champions called her an enlightened sage. Critics called her a charlatan. How does a self-educated child from the Russian provinces end up the acknowledged head of a community numbering nearly 100,000, with journals in London, Paris, New York, and Madras? And why can biographers agree on so little about where she actually went?

• 2. An Unreliable Witness

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  Developing a reliable account of her life has proved difficult, because in later years she deliberately provided contradictory accounts and falsifications about her own past. Very few of her own writings from before 1873 survive, so biographers lean heavily on those unreliable later accounts. The accounts offered by her relatives have themselves been judged dubious. Historian of esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke noted that knowledge of her early travels rests on her own largely uncorroborated accounts, marred by being occasionally conflicting in their chronology. Religious studies scholar Bruce F. Campbell found no reliable account for one stretch of roughly 25 years. Biographer Peter Washington put it plainly: at a certain point myth and reality begin to merge seamlessly in her biography. Marion Meade, surveying her tales of Tibet and other adventures, judged that hardly a word of this appears to be true. The gaps matter because the most spectacular claims, her years among the Masters and her time in Tibet, are exactly the ones that lack independent witnesses. When detailed records of her life become reliable again, she is already in New York City, a fact that shapes how the rest of this story can be told.

• 3. The Masters And Tibet

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  Senzar was the name she gave to an ancient, unknown language she said she was taught in Tibet, and in which she translated texts preserved by monks at a monastery she was not permitted to enter. Her teachers there were two figures she called the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, named Morya and Koot Hoomi. Both, she said, were Kashmiris of Punjabi origin, and they lived near Tashilhunpo Monastery at Shigatse. Koot Hoomi was described as having spent time in London and Leipzig, fluent in English and French, a vegetarian like Morya. The Masters, by her account, helped her develop psychic powers: clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, the dematerialization of objects, and the projection of astral bodies so as to appear in two places at once. She said she remained on this retreat from late 1868 until late 1870. Doubts have followed these claims closely, since they rely entirely on her own word. During the nineteenth century Tibet was closed to Europeans, who faced bandits and harsh terrain. Yet traders and pilgrims from neighboring lands could enter freely, and some biographers suggest she might have passed if mistaken for an Asian. The scholar of Buddhism D. T. Suzuki noted that she later showed an advanced knowledge of Mahayana Buddhism consistent with study in a Tibetan monastery. Gary Lachman observed that if she truly spent time there, she would be one of the greatest travelers of the nineteenth century, before adding, in all honesty I do not know.

• 4. From Spiritualism To A Society

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  On the 8th of July 1873, Blavatsky arrived in New York City and moved into a women's housing cooperative on Madison Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, earning a wage through piece work sewing and designing advertising cards. By the early 1870s she had been involved in the Spiritualist movement, but with a sharp dissent. She defended the reality of Spiritualist phenomena while arguing that the entities contacted were not the spirits of the dead, calling them instead mischievous elementals or the shells left behind by the deceased. A news story about two Vermont brothers, William and Horatio Eddy, drew her to Chittenden in October 1874. There she met the reporter Henry Steel Olcott, who was investigating the brothers for the Daily Graphic. They became close friends, giving each other the nicknames Maloney and Jack. Through a group they called the Miracle Club they met an Irish Spiritualist, William Quan Judge. At a meeting on the 7th of September 1875, the three agreed to form an esoteric organization, and Charles Sotheran suggested they call it the Theosophical Society. The term came from the Greek theos and sophia, meaning god-wisdom or divine wisdom. Olcott became chairman, Judge secretary, and Blavatsky corresponding secretary, though she remained the leading theoretician. Prominent figures including Thomas Edison and Abner Doubleday later joined.

• 5. Isis Unveiled And The Secret Doctrine

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  Isis Unveiled appeared in two volumes in 1877, published by J.W. Bouton and edited by Professor of Philosophy Alexander Wilder. Blavatsky had hoped to call it The Veil of Isis. While writing it she claimed to be aware of a second consciousness within her, which she called the lodger who is in me, and credited it with inspiring much of the text. The book argued that all the world's religions stemmed from a single Ancient Wisdom, linked to Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, and it criticized Darwinian evolution for dealing only with the physical world. Reviewers noted it quoted around 100 other books without acknowledgement. It sold well regardless, its initial print run of 1,000 copies selling out in a week, and the publisher asked for a sequel she declined. More than a decade later came The Secret Doctrine, a roughly 1,500-page work she presented as a commentary on the Book of Dzyan, a text she said was written in Senzar. No commercial publisher would take it, so she founded the Theosophical Publishing Company, releasing the first volume in October 1888 and the second in January 1889. Most scholars of Buddhism concluded there was no such text as the Book of Dzyan, and that it was her invention. In its pages she laid out a cosmogony of Root Races. The first lived on an Imperishable Sacred Land, the fourth on Atlantis, and the fifth, the Aryans, were found across the world as she wrote. She said a sixth would be heralded by the arrival of Maitreya.

• 6. India And The Coulomb Affair

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  In February 1879, after sailing from Liverpool aboard the Speke Hall, Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in Bombay, where Arya Samaj member Hurrychund Chintamon organized celebrations. They took a house on Girgaum Road and associated largely with Indians rather than the governing British elite. British intelligence services monitored her, suspecting she worked for Russia. In May 1880, while in Ceylon, she and Olcott took the Five Precepts and converted to Buddhism, apparently the first from the United States to do so. They launched a monthly magazine, The Theosophist, whose first issue came out in October 1879, and its management passed to Damodar K. Mavalankar, who introduced the practice of calling the Masters mahatmas. At Allahabad they met Alfred Percy Sinnett, editor of The Pioneer, who pressed Blavatsky to contact the Masters for him. The result was over 1400 pages attributed to Koot Hoomi and Morya, known as the Mahatma Letters. Sinnett summarized them in his 1883 book Esoteric Buddhism, a title she disliked, and Max Muller noted the contents were not Buddhist. Marion Meade later judged there can be no reasonable doubt that Helena was their author. Trouble came through Emma Coulomb, an old acquaintance Blavatsky had taken into her home. After a dispute over funds, the Coulombs produced letters they claimed proved her phenomena were fraudulent, and a Madras magazine published an expose. The story reached London newspaper The Times and damaged the Society internally, though it stayed popular in India.

• 7. The Verdict Of The Investigators

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  Richard Hodgson wrote the report that haunted her reputation, published by the Society for Psychical Research in December 1885. He accused Blavatsky of being a spy for the Russian government and of faking paranormal phenomena, leaning largely on the Coulombs' claims. She had earlier complied with the Society's request to study her, though she was unimpressed and mocked it as the Spookical Research Society. The Hodgson report caused tension within Theosophy, with followers including Babaji and Subba Row resigning over it. She wanted to sue, but Olcott advised against it, fearing the publicity. In private letters she expressed relief that the criticism fell on her and that the identity of the Masters had not been exposed. The matter did not rest with her death. In 1986 the Society for Psychical Research admitted that Hodgson had set out to attack rather than fairly analyze her, and retracted the report's findings. Even so, the scholar Johnson cautioned that Theosophists have overinterpreted this as complete vindication, when many questions Hodgson raised remain unanswered. Other critics piled on across the years. William Emmette Coleman cited evidence of heavy plagiarism from older esoteric sources. Eastern literature scholar Arthur Lillie printed extracts side by side to show borrowing, and argued from spelling and expression that she had written the Mahatma Letters herself. Carl Jung criticized her work virulently, and Agehananda Bharati dismissed it as a melee of horrendous hogwash.

• 8. Lucifer And Legacy

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  Lucifer was the controversial title Blavatsky gave to the magazine she founded in London, where she chose to ignore claims about paranormal phenomena and discuss philosophy instead. By then she used a wheelchair, having moved through Naples, Wurzburg, and Ostend before settling in the city in May 1887. She established the Blavatsky Lodge as a rival to Sinnett's, draining much of its membership, and in 1888 created an Esoteric Section under her complete control. Visitors to her London circle included the poet W. B. Yeats and, in November 1889, the Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi, who became an associate member of her Lodge in March 1891. The social reformer Annie Besant reviewed The Secret Doctrine, then joined the Theosophists, and in August 1890 Blavatsky moved into Besant's house at 19 Avenue Road in St. John's Wood. There she wrote The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence. She died in Besant's house on the afternoon of the 8th of May 1891, a date Theosophists have commemorated ever since as White Lotus Day. Her body was cremated at Woking Crematorium on the 11th of May. Her ideas outlived her in directions she could not control. Theosophy influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West, and shaped later currents including Anthroposophy and the New Age Movement. Her writings on Root Races were cited as an influence on Ariosophy, and Hannah Newman argued they contributed to Nazi ideology, though Lachman insisted she would likely have denounced such racist ideas. In Dnipro, the city of her birth, a street was renamed Olena Blavatsky Street in 2015 under decommunization laws.