Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a Russian author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.
Born into an aristocratic family of mixed Russian-German descent 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.