BLVATSKY, HELENA PETROVNA. – Founder of the Theosophical Society, born at Ekaterinoslav, in southern Russia, on 31 July 1831, died in London on 8 May 1891. In childhood she was subject to hallucinations. Later, as a traveller in Tibet, she was initiated into her particular kind of theosophical studies. She then went to Egypt. The term theosophy dates back, in the 3rd century, to Ammonius Saccas, and its meaning has gradually been expanded through heretical speculations of the Simonians, Ophites, Gnostics, Valentinians, Neoplatonists (Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Longinus), and was then taken in new directions both by Hermetic and Rosicrucian Orders and by contributions from Jacob Boehme, Henry Vaughan and William Law. Theosophy, or esoteric philosophy, in the writings of B., may be said to have found an almost complete exposition. She started from the conception of man as a spiritual being and, in essence, one with the Universal Spirit.
In 1873, B. went to the United States and there, two years later – still in connection with the Tibetan theosophical group that had initiated her – together with Colonel Henry S. Olcott, William Q. Judge and others, she founded in New York the Theosophical Society. For its benefit she produced a vast literature on occultism. Among the works to be mentioned are: *Isis Unveiled* (New York 1877), *The Secret Doctrine* (ibid. 1888), *The Key to Theosophy* (ibid. 1890), *The Voice of Silence* (ibid. 1889), and *The Theosophical Glossary* (ibid. 1892).
She also founded and edited various journals. In 1895 Katherine Hilgard produced a compendium of all this Blavatskian output, though of doubtful scientific character. When B. died, her followers were reckoned to number a hundred thousand. There were, however, those who regarded her as “a charlatan.”