Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , 1831-91, Russian theosophist and occultist. She was the daughter of a German named Hahn who had settled in Russia and who was distantly connected with the Russian aristocracy. At the age of 16 she married an elderly man, Nicephore Blavatsky, whom she soon left. She traveled extensively in Asia, the United States, and Europe. An imposing and persuasive woman, she claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet, where she was supposedly initiated into mysteries of the occult. In 1873 she went to New York City, and in collaboration with prominent persons interested in spiritism she founded (1875) the Theosophical Society. The society soon experienced serious schisms, and in 1878 Madame Blavatsky, as she was known, left for India, where she established headquarters at Adyar near Madras (now Chennai). There she devoted herself, with some success, to theosophical organization and propaganda. She demonstrated many supernormal phenomena, which were accepted as miracles by her followers, but published claims of fraud in the 1880s and 90s seriously damaged her reputation. Her major works were Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), which became the textbooks of her disciples. The day of her death (May 8) is celebrated by her followers as White Lotus Day.

Bibliography: See her memoirs (comp. by M. K. Neff, 2d ed. 1967); biographies by G. M. Williams (1946) and J. Symonds (1959, repr. 1960); K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (1995); P. Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (1995). See also bibliography under theosophy.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna Hahn (1831–91), leader of the Theosophic movement, was born in Russia and lived in America (1874–78) after a wildly romantic and erratic career on the Continent, in the Near East, and in Egypt and India. After a period of spiritualism in America, Mme Blavatsky with the aid of Colonel Henry S. Olcott founded her Theosophical Society and published Isis Unveiled (1877), a plagiarized occult work denouncing the spiritualism she had formerly advocated. After leaving the U.S., she continued her theosophic preaching in India, which ended with exposés that drove her to Europe and England. Although afflicted with enough diseases to kill any ordinary person, she lived to see herself venerated as a martyr. The most important of her mystical writings is The Secret Doctrine (2 vols., 1888), an involved exposition of Theosophy.