page_title: Helena Blavatsky
section_title: Theosophy, the Masters, and the "Ancient Wisdom"
hierarchical_section_title: Helena Blavatsky / Theories and doctrines / Theosophy, the Masters, and the "Ancient Wisdom"
caption_attribution_description: Adyar Емблема на Интернационалното Теософско Общества (Adyar)
context_page_description: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a controversial Russian occultist, philosopher, and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy, the esoteric movement that the society promoted.
  Born into an aristocratic Russian-German family in Yekaterinoslav, then in the Russian Empire, Blavatsky traveled widely around the empire as a child. Largely self-educated, she developed an interest in Western esotericism during her teenage years. According to her later claims, in 1849 she embarked on a series of world travels, visiting Europe, the Americas, and India. She also claimed that during this period she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom", who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy and science. Both contemporary critics and later biographers have argued that some or all of these foreign visits were fictitious, and that she spent this period in Europe.
context_section_description: Blavatsky was the leading theoretician of the Theosophical Society, responsible for establishing its "doctrinal basis". The ideas expounded in her published texts provide the basis from which the Society and wider Theosophical movement emerged. Blavatsky's Theosophical ideas were a form of occultism. She subscribed to the anti-Christian current of thought within Western esotericism which emphasized the idea of an ancient and universal "occult science" that should be revived. Blavatsky stated that the Theosophical teachings were passed on to her by adepts, who lived in various parts of the world.
  Fundamentally, the underlying concept behind Blavatsky's Theosophy was that there was an "ancient wisdom religion" which had once been found across the world, and which was known to various ancient figures, such as the Greek philosopher Plato and the ancient Hindu sages.
  Blavatsky connected this ancient wisdom religion to Hermetic philosophy, a worldview in which everything in the universe is identified as an emanation from a Godhead. Blavatsky believed that all of the world's religions developed from this original global faith.
  Blavatsky understood her Theosophy to be the heir to the Neoplatonist philosophers of Late Antiquity, who had also embraced Hermetic philosophy. Blavatsky claimed that due to Christianization in Europe, this magical tradition was lost there, but it persisted in modified form in India and Africa, promoting a self-consciously magical disenchantment narrative. In turn, Blavatsky believed that the Theosophical movement's revival of the "ancient wisdom religion" would lead to it spreading across the world, eclipsing the established world religions.
  Thus, in bringing these Theosophical ideas to humanity, Blavatsky viewed herself as a messianic figure.
  According to Goodrick-Clarke, the Theosophical Society "disseminated an elaborate philosophical edifice involving a cosmogony, the macrocosm of the universe, spiritual hierarchies, and intermediary beings, the latter having correspondences with a hierarchical conception of the microcosm of man."
  Officially, the Society-based itself upon the following three objectives:
  To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour.
  To encourage the study of Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Science.
  To investigate the unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man.
  Washington believed that the purpose of these three precepts was to lead to the "discovery of the powers latent in man through the occult study of science, philosophy and religion [which] shall be the preferred route to the social harmony and equality which will prefigure – and perhaps become – the divine harmony."
  While living in New York City, Blavatsky had referred to herself as a "Buddhist", although only officially embraced Buddhism while in Ceylon. However, Lachman stated that her Buddhism was "highly eccentric and had little to do with the Buddhism of scholars like [Max] Müller or that of your average Buddhist". Blavatsky argued that The Buddha had sought to return to the teachings of the Vedas, and that Buddhism therefore represented a more accurate survival of ancient Brahmanism than modern Hinduism.
  Although critical of Catholicism and Protestantism, and opposing their growth in Asia, throughout her life she remained highly sympathetic to the Russian Orthodox Church, commenting that "with the faith of the Russian Church I will not even compare Buddhism".
  G. R. S. Mead proclaimed, "Two things in all the chaos of her [Blavatsky's] cosmos stood firm in every mood – that her Teachers existed and that she had not cheated."
caption: The logo for the Theosophical Society brought together various ancient symbols
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