Blavatsky fabricated her Himalayan sources and cobbled together available texts

Evidence

Blavatsky claimed to have received her esoteric knowledge from “Himalayan masters” in Tibet, but there is no evidence that she ever reached that country, which was closed to outsiders at the time. Instead, she seems simply to have cobbled together material from the mass of Asian religious texts and Western esotericism widely available in Europe. Nonetheless, her personal magnetism and fl air for the dramatic gave her teachings the requisite air of authenticity. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 548

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Webster and Queenborough made secret societies the prime movers of history — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 274