Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (born as Helena von Hahn; (1831-1891)) was a founder of Theosophy and the Theosophical Society.
Blavatsky grew up amid a culture rich in spirituality and traditional Russian mythologies, which introduced her to the realm of the supernatural. Helena's great-grand nephew Boris de Zirkoff ( 1902–1981)[1] was an active member of the Theosophical Society and editor of the Blavatsky Collected Writings.
Blavatsky was a world traveler who eventually settled in India where,
with Olcott (Colonel Henry Steel Olcott was an American military officer, journalist, lawyer and the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society), established the headquarters of the Society in Madras (now Chennai). Her first major book Isis Unveiled (1877) presented elements mainly from the Western wisdom tradition based on her extensive travels in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Her second major work The Secret Doctrine (1888), contains a commentary on The Book of Dzyan, and is based upon what she called the Ancient Wisdom or Wisdom Religion, which is described as the underlying basis of all the religions of humanity. These writings, along with her Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence are key texts.
According to her own story as told to a later biographer, she spent the years 1848 to 1858 traveling the world. She visited Egypt, France, Canada (Quebec), England, South America, Germany, Mexico, India, Greece and especially Tibet, where she studied for some years with the ascetics, to whom she referred as Brothers. Blavatsky was initiated for theosophical work while in Tibet. Going to Tibet seems to be in vogue. People still claim that today.
In 1873 she emigrated to New York City. Impressing people with her professed psychic abilities, she was spurred on to continue her mediumship. Mediumship (among other psychical and spiritual sciences of the time), based upon the belief known as spiritualism which began at Rochester, NY [http://pvrguymale.blogspot.com/2011/03/healing-5-trouble-is-in-mind.html], was a widely popular and fast-spreading field upon which Blavatsky based her career.

Blavatsky, in her writings Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), claimed to reveal the inner truth behind all the world's religions and philosophies. She had been taught, she said, by members of a select brotherhood of advanced human beings who made their home in the Himalayas, but the teachings were the same truth that had been taught by all the world's great masters. According to this teaching, pure impersonal Being was the source of all existing beings; human beings moved through many reincarnations in gaining spiritual advancement; and ultimately all beings are united in the One.

Throughout her career she claimed to have demonstrated physical and mental psychic feats which included levitation, clairvoyance, out-of-body projection, telepathy and clairaudience. Another claim of hers was materialization (producing physical objects out of nothing), though in general, her interests were more in the area of 'theory' and 'laws' rather than demonstration.

Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott

In 1874 at the farm of the Eddy Brothers, Helena met Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer, agricultural expert, and journalist who covered the spiritualist phenomenon. Soon they were working together in the "Lamasery" (alternate spelling: "Lamastery") where her book Isis Unveiled was written. In 1878, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States, but after leaving for India later that year she never returned to the country.
In August, 1890 she formed the "Inner Circle" of 12 disciples: "Countess Constance Wachtmeister, Mrs Isabel Cooper-Oakley, Miss Emily Kislingbury, Miss Laura Cooper, Mrs Annie Besant, Mrs Alice Cleather, Dr Archibald Keightley, Herbert Coryn, Claude Wright, G. R. S. Mead, E. T. Sturdy, and Walter Old".
[1] Boris de Zirkoff (1902–1981) was the editor of the Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky. He was a grand-nephew of H.P. Blavatsky and a student of her work. He moved to Point Loma, California in the early 1920s when Katherine Tingley was the leader of the Theosophists. Before the death of the next leader Gottfried de Purucker[2] he moved to Los Angeles. He always supported the original teachings of Blavatsky and her gurus.
[2] Gottfried de Purucker (1874, Suffern, New York –1942) was an author and Theosophist who joined the Theosophical Society on August 16, 1893. At one time he was the leader of the Theosophical Society Pasadena.
Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest it was poo-ROO-ker and added "Because I was brought up and educated largely in French Switzerland, in Geneva, I frequently, in fact commonly, sign my name 'G. de Purucker,' using the French particle de instead of the German von, following in this the custom of many people of German origin who live or have lived in French-speaking countries."