Macabre Grimoire Chapter 19 Helena Blavatsky

Macabre Grimoire Chapter 19 Helena Blavatsky Hosts Ari Show, Robert Mehling, and Travis Nye Produced by Robert Mehling Voice Over by Dave Holly Opening Theme Enhance Your Starry Night by Mouthful of Bees   Helena Blavatsky (The Real Life Doctor Strange and “The Founding Mother of the Occult in America” — Kurt Vaughnagan ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky   https://youtu.be/uy48wvcnRCA   Helena Blavatsky is one of the most controversial figures we’ve covered so far.  She’s been called a witch, a profit, a medium, a hack, a sorceress, a fraud and everything in between.  If you’re from the west and practice yoga you can thank the legacy of her cultural influence. Legendary author Kurt Vaughnagan called her “The Founding Mother of the Occult in America.”   Born in August of 1831 to an ethnic German Russian aristocratic family, Blavatsky grew up at on a crossroads of eastern and western cultures.  Mixing the elite European intelligentsia world view of her parents with the eastern folklore and magic of rural Russia.   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, claiming 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.   By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead. Relocating to the United States in 1873, she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and rose to public attention as a spirit medium, attention that included public accusations of fraudulence.   In New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with Olcott and William Quan Judge in 1875. In 1877 she published Isis Unveiled, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view. Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as “the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy”, proclaiming that it was reviving an “Ancient Wisdom” which underlay all the world’s religions.   In 1880 she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. That same year, while in Ceylon she and Olcott became, supposedly, the first people from the United States to formally convert to Buddhism. Although opposed by the British administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena.   Amid ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, there establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London. Here she published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she claimed were ancient Tibetan manuscripts, as well as two further books, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence.   She died of influenza on May 8th, 1891.