Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, uk, Олена Петрівна Блаватська, Olena Petrivna Blavatska (; – 8 May 1891), often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.

Born into an aristocratic family of Russian-German descent in Yekaterinoslav, then in the Russian Empire (now Dnipro in Ukraine), 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. Both contemporary critics and later biographers have argued that some or all of these foreign visits were fictitious, and that she spent this period in Europe. By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead. Relocating to the United States in 1873, she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and rose to public attention as a spirit medium, attention that included public accusations of fraudulence.

In 1875 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", proclaiming that it was reviving an "Ancient Wisdom" which underlay all the world's religions. In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. That same year, while in Ceylon, she and Olcott became the first people from the United States to formally convert to Buddhism. 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. Amid ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, there establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London. Here 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''. She died of influenza in 1891.

Blavatsky was a controversial figure during her lifetime, championed by supporters as an enlightened Sage and derided as a charlatan by critics. Her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents like Ariosophy, Anthroposophy, and the New Age Movement.

Early life

Developing a reliable account of Blavatsky's life has proved difficult for biographers because in later life she deliberately provided contradictory accounts and falsifications about her own past. Furthermore, very few of her own writings written before 1873 survive, meaning that biographers must rely heavily on these unreliable later accounts. The accounts of her early life provided by her family members have also been considered dubious by biographers.

Childhood: 1831–1849

Birth and family background

Blavatsky was born as Helena Petrovna von Hahn in the town of Yekaterinoslav, then part of the Russian Empire. Her birth date was 12 August 1831, although according to the Julian calendar used in 19th-century Russia it was 31 July. Immediately after her birth, she was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. At the time, Yekaterinoslav was undergoing a cholera epidemic, and her mother contracted the disease shortly after childbirth; despite the expectations of their doctor, both mother and child survived the epidemic.

Blavatsky's family was aristocratic. Her mother was Helena Andreyevna von Hahn (Russian: Елена Андреевна Ган, 1814–1842; née Fadeyeva), a self-educated 17-year-old who was the daughter of Princess Yelena Pavlovna Dolgorukaya, a similarly self-educated aristocrat. Blavatsky's father was Pyotr Alexeyevich von Hahn (Russian: Пётр Алексеевич Ган, 1798–1873), a descendant of the German von Hahn aristocratic family, who served as a captain in the Russian Royal Horse Artillery, and would later rise to the rank of colonel. Pyotr had not been present at his daughter's birth, having been in Poland fighting to suppress the November Uprising against Russian rule, and first saw her when she was six months old. As well as her Russian and German ancestry, Blavatsky could also claim French heritage, for a great-great grandfather had been a French Huguenot nobleman who had fled to Russia to escape persecution, there serving in the court of Catherine the Great.

As a result of Pyotr's career, the family frequently moved to different parts of the Empire, accompanied by their servants, a mobile childhood that may have influenced Blavatsky's largely nomadic lifestyle in later life. A year after Pyotr's arrival in Yekaterinoslav, the family relocated to the nearby army town of Romankovo. When Blavatsky was two years old, her younger brother, Sasha, died in another army town when no medical help could be found. In 1835, mother and daughter moved to Odessa, where Blavatsky's maternal grandfather Andrei Fadeyev, a civil administrator for the imperial authorities, had recently been posted. It was in this city that Blavatsky's sister Vera Petrovna was born.

St. Petersburg, Poltava, and Saratov

After a return to rural Ukraine, Pyotr was posted to Saint Petersburg, where the family moved in 1836. Blavatsky's mother liked the city, there establishing her own literary career, penning novels under the pseudonym of "Zenaida R-va" and translating the works of the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton for Russian publication. When Pyotr returned to Ukraine circa 1837, she remained in the city. After Fadeyev was assigned to become a trustee for the Kalmyk people of Central Asia, Blavatsky and her mother accompanied him to Astrakhan, where they befriended a Kalmyk leader, Tumen. The Kalmyks were practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, and it was here that Blavatsky gained her first experience with the religion.

In 1838, Blavatsky's mother moved with her daughters to be with her husband at Poltava, where she taught Blavatsky how to play the piano and organized for her to take dance lessons. As a result of her poor health, Blavatsky's mother returned to Odessa, where Blavatsky learned English from a British governess. They next moved to Saratov, where a brother, Leonid, was born in June 1840. The family proceeded to Poland and then back to Odessa, where Blavatsky's mother died of tuberculosis in June 1842, aged 28.

The three surviving children were sent to live with their maternal grandparents in Saratov, where their grandfather Andrei had been appointed Governor of Saratov Governorate. The historian Richard Davenport-Hines described the young Blavatsky as "a petted, wayward, invalid child" who was a "beguiling story-teller". Accounts provided by relatives reveal that she socialized largely with lower-class children and that she enjoyed playing pranks and reading. She was educated in French, art, and music, all subjects designed to enable her to find a husband. With her grandparents she holidayed in Tumen's Kalmyk summer camp, where she learned horse riding and some Tibetan.

She later claimed that in Saratov she discovered the personal library of her maternal great-grandfather, Prince Pavel Vasilevich Dolgorukov (d. 1838); it contained a variety of books on esoteric subjects, encouraging her burgeoning interest in it. Dolgorukov had been initiated into Freemasonry in the late 1770s and had belonged to the Rite of Strict Observance; there were rumors that he had met both Alessandro Cagliostro and the Count of St. Germain. She also later stated that at this time of life she began to experience visions in which she encountered a "Mysterious Indian" man, and that in later life she would meet this man in the flesh. Many biographers have considered this to be the first appearance of the "Masters" in her life story.

According to some of her later accounts, in 1844–45 Blavatsky was taken by her father to England, where she visited London and Bath. According to this story, in London she received piano lessons from the Bohemian composer Ignaz Moscheles, and performed with Clara Schumann. However, some Blavatsky biographers believe that this visit to Britain never took place, particularly as no mention of it is made in her sister's memoirs. After a year spent living with her aunt, Yekaterina Andreyevna Witte, mother of the future first Prime Minister of the Russian Empire, Sergei Witte, she moved to Tiflis, Georgia, where her grandfather Andrei had been appointed director of state lands in Transcaucasia. Blavatsky claimed that here she established a friendship with Alexander Vladimirovich Golitsyn, a Russian Freemason and member of the Golitsyn family who encouraged her interest in esoteric matters. She would also claim that at this period she had further paranormal experiences, astral traveling

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