Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy: The Society, Books and Scandal

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 to 1891) was a Russian-born writer who co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge. Her two big books, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, claimed to restore an ancient wisdom behind all religions, taught to her by hidden adepts she called the Masters. An 1885 report branded her a fraud, and a 1986 study in the same society's journal attacked that report. Few people did more to bring Hindu and Buddhist ideas to Western readers.

An Uncertain Early Life

She was born Helena Hahn von Rottenstern on August 12, 1831, by the modern calendar, in Yekaterinoslav in the Russian Empire, now Dnipro in Ukraine. Her family was aristocratic, and her mother was a novelist. At 17, in 1849, she married Nikifor Blavatsky, a provincial vice governor in his forties, and soon left him.

What she did over the next two decades is hard to pin down. She later described travels through Europe, the Americas, India and finally Tibet, where she said the Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi trained her near Shigatse. Biographers treat these accounts with caution. She gave contradictory versions herself, few of her writings before 1873 survive, and Tibet was closed to Europeans at the time. The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke described the record as resting on "her own largely uncorroborated accounts."

Founding the Theosophical Society

Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873 and moved in Spiritualist circles. Spiritualism, the movement of mediums and séances, had itself drawn on Emanuel Swedenborg's reports of spirits and on the trance techniques of mesmerism. In October 1874 she met Olcott, a lawyer and journalist, in Chittenden, Vermont, at the home of the Eddy brothers, whose séances he was covering for the Daily Graphic. She defended the reality of séance phenomena but denied that mediums were contacting the dead. In her view they were reaching lesser entities or empty shells.

On September 7, 1875, at a meeting in New York, Blavatsky, Olcott and Judge agreed to form a society, and Charles Sotheran suggested the name. The Theosophical Society was formally founded that November. Theosophy comes from the Greek for divine wisdom, an old term used earlier by the mystic Jakob Böhme among others. Olcott became president, Judge secretary, and Blavatsky corresponding secretary, though she was its real teacher. The society came to state three objects: to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color; to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science; and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in human beings.

Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine

Isis Unveiled, much of it written in the Ithaca home of the Cornell professor Hiram Corson, appeared in two volumes in 1877. It argued that a single ancient wisdom underlies the world's religions, tied it to Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, and criticized Darwinian evolution for ignoring the spiritual side of life. The first printing of 1,000 copies reportedly sold out in a week, even as reviewers pointed out that it quoted around a hundred other books without acknowledgment.

The Secret Doctrine, published in London in two volumes in 1888 and 1889, is subtitled "The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy." Blavatsky presented it as a commentary on an ancient text, the Book of Dzyan, which she said was written in a lost language called Senzar. Its first volume, Cosmogenesis, describes a universe that appears and dissolves in vast cycles. Its second, Anthropogenesis, traces humanity through a series of seven "root races." Three basic propositions run through it: one boundless and unknowable principle, the periodic manifestation of the universe, and the identity of every soul with a universal oversoul, passing through repeated lives under karma.

Scholars of ancient languages have found no trace of the Book of Dzyan or of Senzar outside her writings, and the historian Ronald Fritze calls the book's factual basis "nonexistent." Critics also point to passages that rank some peoples below others, which later racist writers would exploit.

India, the Coulombs and the Hodgson Report

Blavatsky became a United States citizen in July 1878, and she and Olcott sailed for India soon after. In May 1880 they arrived in Ceylon, where both formally embraced Buddhism, and in 1882 the society bought an estate at Adyar, near Madras, which remains its headquarters. Branches spread quickly. By 1885 the society had chartered 121 lodges, 106 of them in India, Burma and Ceylon.

Trouble came from inside the house. Emma Coulomb and her husband, employees at Adyar, were dismissed and then produced letters they said Blavatsky had written, showing that her miracles were staged. A Madras missionary magazine printed them, and the story spread internationally. The Society for Psychical Research in London sent Richard Hodgson to investigate, and the committee's report, published in December 1885, sided with the Coulombs. Hodgson called Blavatsky "one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history," judged the Mahatma Letters, supposedly sent by the Masters, to be her own work, and even accused her of spying for Russia. Her reputation never fully recovered.

The 1986 Reappraisal

In April 1986 the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research published "J'Accuse," a critique of the Hodgson report by Vernon Harrison, a past president of the Royal Photographic Society and a specialist in forgery. Harrison argued that it was the Coulomb letters, not the Mahatma Letters, that were likely forged, and that most of the Mahatma Letters now in the British Library are not in Blavatsky's handwriting. He concluded that Hodgson "ignored all evidence that could be used in her favour" and that "His case against Madame H. P. Blavatsky is not proven."

The details matter here. The journal's editor noted that the society as a body holds no collective opinions, so the 1885 report had never really been its official verdict, and the 1986 paper was not an official reversal either. Harrison expanded his study into a book in 1997. His work weakens the main exposé of Blavatsky, but it does not show that her phenomena were genuine or that the Masters existed.

Last Years in London

Blavatsky left India in 1885 in poor health and spent her final years in Europe, mostly London. There she founded the Blavatsky Lodge and a magazine provocatively titled Lucifer, and wrote The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence. Visitors included the poet W. B. Yeats and, in 1889, the young law student Mohandas Gandhi. The social reformer Annie Besant reviewed The Secret Doctrine, met its author and joined the movement. Blavatsky died of influenza in Besant's house on May 8, 1891, a date Theosophists mark as White Lotus Day.

Theosophy's Influence

The movement split soon after her death. In 1895 Judge broke with Olcott and Besant and took most of the American section with him, while the Adyar society, led by Besant from 1907, promoted the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as a coming world teacher until he renounced the role in 1929. That same controversy pushed Rudolf Steiner, head of the German section, to leave in 1913 and found anthroposophy, a story told in our article on Steiner.

Her wider legacy is large and mixed. Historians of esotericism call her the central figure of the nineteenth-century occult revival, and many trace the New Age movement to the Theosophical Society. In Asia, Olcott and the society supported the Buddhist revival in Ceylon, and Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were among Indian leaders who said Theosophy led them back to their own heritage. Popular Western ideas of karma and reincarnation owe a great deal to her books. Her teachings on root races, by contrast, were taken up by the Ariosophists in Germany and Austria, whose racial ideas fed into Nazi ideology, an outcome the biographer Gary Lachman argues she would have rejected.

How to Read Her

Blavatsky's claims about the Masters, Senzar and her own powers have never been independently confirmed, and her books borrow heavily from earlier writers. Her talent was synthesis: she joined Spiritualism, Western esotericism and Asian religion into one system and gave it a name and an organization. For readers interested in spiritual science, she is best studied as a founder whose ideas spread far beyond her own credibility, which is a reason to check each idea on its own merits.

Sources and further reading

• Helena Blavatsky (Wikipedia)
• Theosophical Society (Wikipedia)
• Hodgson Report (Wikipedia)