Helena Blavatsky

To put it simply, in Theosophy Helena Blavatsky gave the world a religious faith in human evolution as an integral part of cosmic evolution. The goal was perfection and conscious participation in the evolutionary process—self-directed evolution, a concept that spurred the Eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and, although they don’t admit it, today’s Transhumanist movement). Blavatsky taught that this process was overseen by the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, a hierarchy of spiritual beings who’d been guiding humanity’s development for millennia.