Madame Blavatsky blurred her own biography so well that historians still struggle
Helena Blavatsky claimed secret masters trained her in Tibet, that she toured the world for years, and that she played duets with Clara Schumann. Biographers doubt much of it. Yet the Theosophical Society she co-founded in 1875 helped carry Hindu and Buddhist ideas westward and seeded the New Age movement.
She was born Helena Hahn von Rottenstern in 1831 in Yekaterinoslav, during a cholera outbreak that her mother survived against expectations. Her father was an artillery officer, so the family kept moving across the Russian Empire. In Astrakhan she met Kalmyk people who practised Tibetan Buddhism, and later picked up riding and some Tibetan at their summer camp. Her mother, a novelist, died of tuberculosis when Helena was ten. She said she found her great-grandfather's esoteric library, the collection of a Freemason, and began seeing visions of a mysterious Indian man.
At 17 she married Nikifor Blavatsky, a provincial vice governor in his forties, then repeatedly tried to run away. Sent off to meet her father, she said she slipped her escorts, bribed a ship's captain and reached Constantinople, starting nine years of wandering. She kept no diary and travelled without witnesses; one scholar says no reliable account covers the next 25 years, and critics think she was mostly in Europe. She herself later issued contradictory versions of her past.
By the 1870s she was in the Spiritualist scene, arguing that seance phenomena were real but not the spirits of the dead. In New York she met Henry Steel Olcott, and with him and William Quan Judge founded the Theosophical Society. Her book Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, presented Theosophy as a synthesis of science, religion and philosophy reviving an ancient wisdom behind all faiths. Moving to India in 1880, she and Olcott formally converted to Buddhism in Ceylon two years later, the first Americans to do so.
Charges that she faked paranormal phenomena damaged the Society. Ill, she went to London in 1885, set up the Blavatsky Lodge, met a young law student named Gandhi, and published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she said were ancient Tibetan manuscripts. Admirers saw a sage, detractors a charlatan. She died of influenza in 1891.
Source: Helena Blavatsky
