Helena Blavatsky

Born into Russian aristocracy in 1831, Helena Blavatsky grew up largely self-educated with a pull toward Western esotericism. She later claimed years of world travel and training in Tibet under spiritual adepts called the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom," though critics argued she never left Europe. By the early 1870s she was tangled in Spiritualism, insisting the entities contacted were not the dead but something else entirely. In 1875, after relocating to New York and befriending Henry Steel Olcott, she co-founded the Theosophical Society and two years later published Isis Unveiled, pitching Theosophy as the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. She and Olcott moved to India in 1880, where they became the first Americans to formally convert to Buddhism, but the Society fractured after she was accused of faking paranormal phenomena. Returning to Europe in failing health, she published The Secret Doctrine in London before dying of influenza in 1891, leaving behind a movement that seeded Anthroposophy, Ariosophy, and the entire scaffold of New Age thought.