Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born at Ekaterinoslav Russia, on the 31st of July, 1831. She was the daughter of Colonel Peter Hahn, a member of a Mecklenburg family settled in Russia. She married, at the age of seventeen Nicephore Blavatsky, a Russian official in Caucasia, a man very much older than herself. Her married life was short duration as she separated from her husband in a few months. The next year or so she occupied chiefly in traveling. Texas, Mexico, Canada, and India, were each in turn the scene of her wanderings, and she twice attempted to enter Tibet, on one occasion she managed to cross its frontier in disguise but lost her way, and after various adventures was found by a body of horseman and escorted homewards. The period between 1848 and 1858, she described as the "veiled" time of her life, refusing to divulge anything that happened to her in those ten years, save stray allusions to a seven year stay in Little and Great Tibet, or in a Himalayan retreat. In 1858 she returned to Russia, where she soon achieved distinction as a spiritualistic medium. Later on she went to the United States where she remained for six years, and became a naturalized citizen. She became prominent in spiritualistic circles in America about 1870. It was there that she founded her school of Theosophy. The idea occurred to her of combining her spiritualistic "control" with Buddhistic legends about Tibetan sages, and she professed to have direct "astral" communication with two Tibetan mahatmas.