Abstract
This article considers how the matriarch of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) constructed the category “science,” situating this construal within a world in which the boundaries of “legitimate” science were more contested than they are today. Focusing on her teachings on rebirth, the article demonstrates that Blavatsky’s doctrines owe a considerable debt to the scientific theories under discussion at her time of writing. It explores her debt to the controversial physicists Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1909), her hostility towards the popular materialist monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), her hatred of Darwinism, and her preference for theories of evolution influenced by German Romanticism, such as the progressivist versions of orthogenesis proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Nageli (1817–1891), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and Darwin’s nemesis, Richard Owen (1804–1892).
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