Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, known as "the extraordinary woman," was one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, together with Colonel H. S. Olcott. She was born in July 1831, at midnight between the 30th and the 31st, in the Russian city of Ekaterinoslav (today Dnipro in Ukraine). Her father, Colonel Peter Hahn, came of a noble family originally from Mecklenburg in Germany, which had settled in Russia some 300 years earlier. Her mother's family was also noble and traced its descent to an ancestor who lived in the ninth century.
H. P. Blavatsky's (HPB's) clairvoyance was so developed that even as a child she was consulted by the nobility about their private affairs and by the police about crimes that had been committed. She was a gifted pianist; as a young girl she had played in London with Clara Schumann and Arabella Goddard.
In 1848, at the age of seventeen, she married General Blavatsky, who was considerably older than she was, and left him soon afterwards. In 1848 and 1849 she studied magic in Egypt with an old Copt and joined the Druzes of Lebanon, a secret community.
In 1851, while walking with her father in London, she saw a tall, imposing Rajput (a member of the warrior nobility of northern India) and recognized him as the protector she had seen in her visions since childhood. This person, known in the Theosophical tradition as the Master Morya, spoke to her of the work she would do under his direction after being prepared in the East.
In 1852–54 she tried to enter Tibet, but succeeded only in 1867–70. In the intervening years she came into contact with spiritualism, learned "to bring under control her extraordinary power of producing phenomena so that she could use it at will," and engaged in "various business ventures" (a trade in fine timber, managing an artificial flower workshop, and so on). We are told that in Tibet she learned to direct occult forces. In 1871 she tried to found a spiritual society in Cairo based on phenomena, but without success. She later went on concert tours in Italy and Russia under the name "Madame Laura." In 1873 she lived in Paris with her brother, painting and writing (among her many talents, she was a good painter and a very clever caricaturist).
While in Paris she received a definite order from the Masters (the "Brothers") to go to New York and await instructions. On the way she exchanged her first-class ticket for steerage tickets for a poor woman and her children who had been swindled, and she landed on 7 July 1873 without money. Although her trunk held 23,000 francs that had been entrusted to her, she earned her living working for a necktie manufacturer. In the end, again following orders, she took this money to the city of Buffalo and handed it to a man she did not know just as he was about to commit suicide. She made an unsuccessful business venture on a farm on Long Island and used up the inheritance of 1,000 rubles left to her on her father's death.
In 1874 she was ordered to go to the Eddy farm at Chittenden, where Colonel H. S. Olcott was investigating various occult phenomena. Together with Olcott she founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Her magnificent work against the materialism of religion and science, Isis Unveiled (Turkish: Peçesiz İsis), was published in 1877. She sent the first income from the book, together with the money she had earned from articles published in Russian newspapers and magazines, to the Red Cross in Russia to help those wounded in the war.
She became an American citizen on 8 July 1878. The same year, again "under orders," she set out for India with Olcott; they landed in Bombay in February 1879. In 1880 the two founders toured Ceylon (Sri Lanka) for the cause of Buddhism, and on 19 May 1881 they themselves became Buddhists. In 1882 the Society's headquarters moved to Adyar in Madras, where it still is today. Between her arrival in 1879 and her visit to Europe in 1884, HPB made various journeys within India. In the founders' absence, a one-sided report by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) tried to portray her as a fraud; the SPR has since withdrawn the charges made against her. Despite her Master's interventions to restore her health, it declined, and after a short visit late that year she was unable to remain at Adyar.
In Würzburg she worked on The Secret Doctrine. According to Countess Wachtmeister, the real authors of this work were the Master Brothers: as with Isis Unveiled, the Brothers gathered the material and placed it before HPB's inner sight. In 1887 at Ostend HPB fell seriously ill, but once again she recovered astonishingly, saying that she had "chosen" to work a few more years in her suffering body. At an invitation she moved to London, which then became the center of Theosophical work in Europe. In this work she was also supported by the occasional visits of the President-Founder, Colonel Olcott. In 1888 the first two volumes of The Secret Doctrine were published.
HPB passed from this world in London on 8 May 1891. Her ashes were divided among New York, India and London; some were buried beneath her statue at Adyar. In her will she asked that her friends gather every year on the anniversary of her death and read passages from Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia and from the Bhagavad Gita. At Colonel Olcott's suggestion this anniversary is commemorated as "White Lotus Day."
Colonel Olcott summed up the secret of HPB's extraordinary power, which brought about rapid changes in the lives of those around her, as follows:
Her amazing occult knowledge, her powers of producing phenomena and her relation with the hidden Masters; together with her social accomplishments, her wide travels and extraordinary adventures, her brilliant gifts, especially as a conversationalist; her grasp of the problems of philology, of the origins of races, of the fundamental bases of religions, and of the keys to the ancient mysteries and symbols.
Her unshakable devotion to the Great Ones illumined HPB's life, and she will always be known as the "Light Bringer" of the nineteenth century.
The Golden Stairs
A clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, an eager intellect, an unveiled spiritual perception, a brotherliness for all, a readiness to give and receive advice and instruction, a loyal sense of duty to the Teacher, a willing obedience to the behests of Truth, once we have placed our confidence in, and believe that Teacher to be in possession of it; a courageous endurance of personal injustice, a brave declaration of principles, a valiant defense of those who are unjustly attacked, and a constant eye to the ideal of human progression and perfection which the secret science depicts: these are the Golden Stairs up the steps of which the learner may climb to the Temple of Divine Wisdom.
— H. P. Blavatsky
