Helena Blavatsky
Photo: London, 1889 · public domain
The daughter of an artillery officer, married off at seventeen and gone within months; then twenty years of travelling of which little is firmly known, and which by her own account took in Egypt, India, Tibet and the teachers she called the Mahatmas. In 1875 in New York she founded the Theosophical Society together with Colonel Olcott, and then wrote “Isis Unveiled” and “The Secret Doctrine” — the books through which the West first heard at such length of karma, reincarnation and the cycles of the world. In 1885 the London Society for Psychical Research declared her phenomena a fraud; the argument has not ended since. Even her opponents do not dispute that without her half the present European vocabulary of the esoteric would not exist.
She was born at Yekaterinoslav — Dnipro today — in the night of 12 August 1831 by the new style; by the old style the date is 31 July. The hour, 01:42 local mean time, comes from her own account and from the family story.