Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Russian-born writer, traveller and medium; co-founder of the Theosophical Society and the author of the two books that built the modern occult vocabulary. A chain-smoking, profane, physically imposing woman who held rooms full of Victorian gentlemen entirely at her mercy, and who is still the most consequential esoteric writer of the last two centuries in the English language.

The single largest vector by which non-Western religious vocabulary entered Western popular spirituality. Karma, reincarnation, chakras, astral planes, ascended masters, root races, the akashic record — the words arrive in English through her, and most people using them today have never heard her name.