1831 – 1891 · A portrait
A Russian-born occultist said hidden teachers showed her humanity's real history. She co-founded a movement, wrote two vast books, and was called a fraud by an investigator whose own report was later itself called unfair.
With Henry Olcott and others, she co-founded the Theosophical Society to promote a hidden wisdom she said ran beneath every world religion, East and West alike.
Her first major book, thirteen hundred pages critiquing the science and religion of her day, argued that mystical insight, not either of them, held the deepest truth about the universe.
An investigator for the Society for Psychical Research, Richard Hodgson, published a report concluding that letters she said came from hidden spiritual teachers were forgeries she had written herself, and called her one of history's most accomplished impostors.
Her two-volume cosmology, presented as a commentary on ancient verses shown to her by hidden teachers, traced human history through seven root races across a series of lost continents, including Atlantis.
The Theosophical Society continues today, still headquartered in India. Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine remain in print in multiple editions. Historians of religion trace much of the later New Age movement's vocabulary — hidden masters, ancient wisdom, spiritual evolution — back to what she wrote in these two books.
A document examiner, Vernon Harrison, called Hodgson's 1885 report slanted and unfair in a 1986 re-examination, without concluding the disputed letters were genuine. Separately, a critic, William Emmette Coleman, showed in 1895 that long unattributed passages had been lifted from other writers. Her 'root races' doctrine is read by many scholars today as racially hierarchical.