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Helena Blavatsky
Declared one of history's most accomplished impostors in 1885 — and the report that did it was substantially discredited by the same society a century later.
Who they were
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) co-founded the Theosophical Society and wrote the books that made it, and is probably the most consequential single figure in the formation of modern Western spirituality.
She is also one of the most contested, and the contest is more interesting than either the hagiography or the debunking allows.
Where they came from
Born Helena von Hahn in Yekaterinoslav, in what is now Ukraine, into a Russian noble family. Married at seventeen to a much older provincial official and left him within months.
The following two decades are largely unverifiable and are the subject of extraordinary claims — travel in Egypt, the Americas, India and, crucially, seven years in Tibet studying under the Masters. Independent corroboration is thin to absent, and Tibet was effectively closed to foreigners at the time.
She surfaced in New York in 1873, became involved in spiritualist circles, and in 1875 co-founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer and journalist, and William Quan Judge. Isis Unveiled appeared in 1877, the society moved to India in 1879, and The Secret Doctrine — her major work — in 1888. She died in London in 1891.
What they taught
The doctrines summarised under Theosophy: a perennial wisdom underlying all religions, preserved by hidden Masters; karma and reincarnation; a hierarchy of planes and subtle bodies; and the root-race cosmology.
Her method was synthesis on a vast scale, drawing on Hindu and Buddhist sources, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, contemporary science and comparative religion — and presenting the result as a recovery of something ancient rather than a construction.
What we can and cannot say
The fraud question requires both halves, and it is almost always given with one.
In 1884 the Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to Adyar to investigate the phenomena associated with her — chiefly the Mahatma letters, which appeared in a shrine cabinet, apparently from the Masters. Two former employees, the Coulombs, alleged they had helped construct sliding panels and trapdoors, and produced letters they said she had written to them.
Hodgson's report, published in 1885, concluded that she was neither a medium nor an agent of hidden Masters but "one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history". That sentence has followed her for a hundred and forty years.
In 1986 the SPR published a reassessment, and this is the part usually omitted. Vernon Harrison, a professional examiner of questioned documents and a former president of the Royal Photographic Society, examined Hodgson's handwriting analysis and found it seriously deficient: Hodgson was not a qualified document examiner, his methodology was unsound, he appeared to have selected evidence to fit a conclusion already reached, and his report was in Harrison's judgement prosecutorial rather than investigative. The SPR issued a statement noting the reassessment.
What this does and does not establish matters. Harrison did not show the Mahatma letters were genuine, and did not claim to. He showed that the famous verdict rested on a flawed investigation. The honest position is that the case against Blavatsky is much weaker than a century of repetition suggests, and that the case for the letters remains unmade.
A separate charge is better founded. William Emmette Coleman's analysis in the 1890s identified very large numbers of unattributed passages in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, taken from contemporary works on comparative religion, mythology and science — sometimes including their errors. The plagiarism charge is broadly accepted, including by scholars sympathetic to her significance.
We can say her influence is beyond dispute and is enormous, and that assessing her as either saint or swindler misses what she actually was: a formidable synthesiser who assembled a vast body of material into a system compelling enough that its vocabulary is now the default language of Western spirituality.
We cannot say what happened at Adyar. What can be said, and this site says it as a matter of method, is that a famous debunking is not automatically better evidenced than the claim it debunked, and that checking the debunking is part of the job.
Further reading
- Vernon Harrison, "J'Accuse: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885" (Journal of the SPR, 1986).
- Richard Hodgson's original report (1885), for what it actually says.
- Gary Lachman, Madame Blavatsky (2012) — sympathetic, and reasonably candid about the problems.