structural:reformatting, linguistic:paraphrasing
Controversy

one of the most significant, controversial, and prolific of modern esotericists... It is more than evident that, whatever one thinks of the more flamboyant aspects of this remarkable and many-sided woman, she possessed a keen intellect and a wide-ranging vision of what occultism could be in the modern world.

—Robert Ellwood, 2005, Religious studies scholar and Vice-President of the Theosophical Society in America (2002-2005).

Blavatsky was (and is) a controversial figure. Blavatsky's devotees often try to attribute the criticism that she has sustained to the fact that she attacked the vested interests of both the Christian establishment and the material scientific skeptics rather than as a reaction to her alleged frauds and impostures. Thus, all critics of her are deflected by her believers (who say that "the slanders on her reputation are the signs of grace: the stigmata that all great martyrs must bear").

Various authors, including William Emmette Coleman and others, have questioned the authenticity of her writings by citing evidence that they are heavily plagiarized from older esoteric sources, pronouncing her claim of the existence of masters of wisdom to be utterly false, and accusing her of being a charlatan, false medium, and falsifier of letters. Eastern literature scholar Arthur Lillie published a list of extracts from mystic works next to extracts from Blavatsky's writings purporting to show her extensive plagiarism in his book Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy. Lillie also analyzed the Mahatma letters and asserted, based on peculiarities of expression and spelling, that they had been written by Blavatsky.

The Traditionalist School writer René Guénon wrote a detailed critique of Theosophy in which he claimed that Blavatsky had acquired all her knowledge naturally from other books rather than supernatural so-called "masters." Carl Jung virulently criticized her work, and Agehananda Bharati dismissed it as "a melee of horrendous hogwash and of fertile inventions of inane esoterica". Mircea Eliade suggested that her theory of spiritual evolution contradicts the entire spirit of Eastern tradition, which is "precisely an anti-evolutionist conception of the spiritual life". After her death, Blavatsky continued to be accused of having fraudulently produced paranormal phenomena by skeptics such as John Nevil Maskelyne, Robert Todd Carroll, and James Randi.