Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

The documented outline is firm enough. She was born Helena von Hahn at Yekaterinoslav in 1831, married Nikifor Blavatsky at seventeen and left him within months, travelled widely and unconventionally for a woman of her class and century, appeared in New York in 1873, and co-founded the Theosophical Society there in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge. She moved the Society's work to India, wrote Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), and died in London in 1891.

The rest is her own testimony, and it is worth setting out precisely because it is so often either swallowed or silently dropped.

She said she had been trained by a hidden brotherhood of Masters or Mahatmas, chiefly the adepts she called Morya and Koot Hoomi, and that she had spent a period in Tibet under their instruction, in her own accounts roughly 1868 to 1870, though she gave the story inconsistently and the frequently repeated "seven years in Tibet" conflates the journey with her wider claim of seven years' training. There is no independent evidence for any of it. No corroborating witness, no document, no record of the journey. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke notes that the claims rest entirely on her own word. Some of her defenders have observed that her grasp of Mahayana ideas was better than a purely literary acquaintance would predict; that is an argument from plausibility, not evidence of the journey.

It was disputed in her lifetime and by people who went to look.

In 1884 the Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to India to investigate the phenomena at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar, above all the Mahatma Letters, messages from the Masters that materialised in a shrine cabinet. Hodgson reported in 1885 that the letters were written by Blavatsky herself, that the cabinet was rigged, and concluded with the sentence that followed her for a century: that she was one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history.

A century later the same Society published a critique of that report. Vernon Harrison, a professional examiner of forged documents, published J'Accuse through the SPR in 1986 and in expanded book form in 1997, finding Hodgson's handwriting analysis amateurish, his procedure prosecutorial rather than investigative, and his report unreliable as evidence.

The distinction here is the whole point, and it is routinely blurred by writers on both sides. Harrison impeached the prosecution; he did not establish the defence. Showing that a 1885 investigation was methodologically bad is not showing that the letters were genuine, and Harrison did not claim it was. Theosophical publications sometimes present the 1986 paper as an SPR retraction and a vindication; it was neither, a learned society publishing a critic in its own journal is doing what such societies do. What can honestly be said is that the case against her was made badly, and that the case for her was never made at all.

None of this settles what she was. Olav Hammer's analysis is useful here because it sidesteps the question: whatever the source of the teaching, the strategies by which Theosophy claimed authority, appeal to hidden Masters, to a lost original wisdom, to Eastern antiquity, were themselves a nineteenth-century construction, and they were enormously effective. Her influence on everything downstream of her is not in doubt by anyone.