To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

14
H. P. Blavatsky and The Theosophical Society
IN 1888 THE PUBLICATION OF The Secret Doctrine by HPB
challenged the accepted dicta of theologians and scientists,
and markedly redirected the thinking of the twentieth century.
Hers was a worldview that reckoned the life cycles of
galaxies and atoms as part of the same evolutionary process
that returns the human soul again and again to earth life.
Who was HPB and what is The Theosophical Society she
helped to found? Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (née von Hahn)
was born in the Ukraine at Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk)
on the river Dnieper on August 12, 1831 ( July 31, Old Style
Russian calendar). Her father, Captain of Artillery Peter
Alexeyevich von Hahn, was a descendant of the Counts
Hahn von Rottenstern-Hahn, an old Mecklenburg family
from Germany, and her mother, Helena Andreyevna,
daughter of Privy Councillor A. M. de Fadeyev and Princess
Helena Pavlovna Dolgorukova, was a gifted novelist who
spoke out against oppression, particularly of women. She
su¤ered from ill health most of her short life, and died at
age 29. Helena, then eleven, with her sister Vera and infant
brother Leonid, left Odessa to live with their maternal
grandparents, the de Fadeyevs, at Saratov, and later at Tiflis
in the Caucasus.