Helena Blavatsky

(1831 - 1891)

After leaving Russia at the age of seventeen in the late 1840s, Helena Blavatsky reported that she traveled across the American West, sustained a wound while fighting on the side of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy, worked as a ostrich-feather trader, and lived for two years in Tibet, where she learned the ancient wisdom of two mahatmas. She helped to found the Theosophical Society in 1875 and published her first book, Isis Unveiled, two years later. In 1885 the London Society for Psychical Research declared her claims of psychic powers fraudulent.