220px-HpbUn article du Paris Review

“Depending on whom you ask, [Helena] Blavatsky – a fat, chain-smoking Russian noblewoman with a profane vocabulary and reputation for occult powers – was either one of the major innovators of modern religious thought or a complete fraud, her books works of great erudition and synthesis or piles of pasted together rubbish. For a few years in the late nineteenth century, she was all the rage.”