The problem with theosophy, W.B. Yeats said, was that its followers wanted to turn a good philosophy into a bad religion. Its founder, Madame Blavatsky, seems to have agreed. ‘There are about half a dozen real theosophists in the world’, she told the great Irish poet. ‘And one of those is stupid.’ Whatever Blavatsky herself could be accused of, stupidity certainly was not one of them. Born Helene Hahn in Ukraine in 1831 – the Blavatsky came from an early marriage that lasted three months – she spent much of her life travelling, from Turkey to Texas, Mexico to Madras, spinning stories about herself and her spirit masters, including Plato, Confucius and Francis Bacon.