Who was Helena Blavatsky, and was she exposed as a fraud?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) was born into Russian minor nobility and, by her own later account, spent much of the 1850s and 1860s traveling through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, though biographers note her own travel claims, including years supposedly spent studying under hidden masters in Tibet, cannot be independently verified and are treated skeptically by most historians, including sympathetic ones. She settled in New York in 1873, where, according to Britannica and the Theosophical Society's own histories, she met Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and together with William Quan Judge they founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 to promote the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and what she called the 'Ancient Wisdom' underlying all world religions.

Blavatsky produced two massive works of occult synthesis: Isis Unveiled (1877), a sprawling critique of contemporary science and Christian orthodoxy, and The Secret Doctrine (1888), her mature cosmology built around cycles of cosmic and human evolution, root races, and reincarnation. She claimed both were guided or dictated by discarnate spiritual 'Mahatmas' or Masters, chiefly figures she called Morya and Koot Hoomi, with whom she said she corresponded via letters that materialized outside ordinary post. In 1884 the Society for Psychical Research in London sent Richard Hodgson to investigate reports of these phenomena at the Society's Adyar headquarters; his 1885 Hodgson Report concluded that Blavatsky had staged the Mahatma letters and physical effects using trapdoors and a confederate, Emma Coulomb, and it named her 'one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.' In 1986, the SPR published a re-examination by Vernon Harrison that found Hodgson's investigation methodologically flawed and biased, and the Society issued a statement saying Blavatsky had been treated unfairly, though this later review addressed the fairness of Hodgson's methods, not an independent vindication of the phenomena themselves.

Theosophy as Blavatsky articulated it holds that all religions, including Christianity, are corrupted or partial transmissions of a single hidden esoteric tradition accessible through occult initiation and guided by a hierarchy of ascended Masters; it teaches karma and reincarnation rather than a single earthly life followed by judgment, and treats Christ as a title or principle attainable by advanced initiates rather than the unique, once-for-all incarnation of God (compare John 14:6 and Acts 4:12, which claim exclusivity Theosophy explicitly denies). Blavatsky's own movement therefore sits outside orthodox Christianity by design, not by accident: she considered institutional Christianity one exoteric shell among many rather than final revelation.