HELENA BLAVATSKY

Helena Blavatsky (12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831 – 8 May 1891)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky [a] (née Hahn von Rottenstern) often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian-born mystic and writer who emigrated to the United States where she co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the primary founder of Theosophy as a belief system.

Born into an aristocratic family in Yekaterinoslav, Blavatsky traveled widely around the empire as a child. Largely self-educated, she developed an interest in Western esotericism during her teenage years. According to her later claims, in 1849 she embarked on a series of world travels, visiting Europe, the Americas, and India. She also claimed that during this period she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom", who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science.

In 1875, in New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with Olcott and William Quan Judge. In 1877, she published Isis Unveiled, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view. Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as "the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy", and claimed it revived the "Ancient Wisdom" which underlay all the world's religions.

Blavatsky was the leading theoretician of the Theosophical Society, responsible for establishing its "doctrinal basis". The ideas expounded in her published texts provide the basis from which the Society and wider Theosophical movement emerged.

Fundamentally, the underlying concept behind Blavatsky's Theosophy was that there was an "ancient wisdom religion" which had once been found across the world, and which was known to various ancient figures, such as the Greek philosophers to the ancient Hindu sages. Blavatsky connected this ancient wisdom religion to Hermetic philosophy, a worldview in which everything in the universe is identified as an emanation from the Godhead. Blavatsky believed that all of the world's religions developed from this original world religion. Blavatsky understood her Theosophy to be the heir to the Neoplatonist philosophers of Late Antiquity, who had also embraced Hermetic philosophy.

Blavatsky claimed that due to Christianization in Europe, this magical tradition was lost there, while it persisted in modified form in India and Africa. She promoted a self-consciously magical disenchantment narrative. Blavatsky believed that the Theosophical movement's revival of the "ancient wisdom religion" would spread across the world, eclipsing the established world religions. Thus, in bringing these Theosophical ideas to humanity,

Although opposed by the British colonial administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena. In ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London. There she published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she claimed were ancient Tibetan manuscripts, as well as two further books, The Key To Theosophy and The Voice Of The Silence. Blavatsky died in 1891.

LINKS:

12 Universal Laws
Philosophical Research Society