Women mystics

Mirra Alfassa (21 February 1878 – 17 November 1973), known to her followers as The Mother or La Mère, was a French-Indian spiritual guru, occultist and yoga teacher, and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name "The Mother". She founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established the town of Auroville; she was influential on the subject of Integral Yoga.
Mirra Alfassa (Mother) was born in Paris in 1878 to a Sephardi Jewish bourgeois family. In her youth, she traveled to Algeria to practice occultism along with Max Théon. After returning, while living in Paris, she guided a group of spiritual seekers. In 1914, she traveled to Pondicherry, India and met Sri Aurobindo and found in him "the dark Asiatic figure" of whom she had visions and called him Krishna. During this first visit, she helped publish a French version of the periodical Arya, which serialized most of Sri Aurobindo's post-political prose writings.
During the First World war she was obliged to leave Pondicherry. After a 4-year stay in Japan, in 1920 she returned to Pondicherry. Gradually, as more and more people joined her and Sri Aurobindo, she organised and developed Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In 1943, she started a school in the ashram and in 1968 established Auroville, an experimental township dedicated to human unity and evolution. She died on 17 November 1973 in Pondicherry.
Satprem, who was one of her followers, captured the last thirty years of Alfassa's life in the 13-volume work, Mother's Agenda.

Colette Béatrice Aboulker-Muscat (28 January 1909 – 25 November 2003) was a French teacher, writer, natural healer, and kabbalist whose focus was on the healing power of dream imagery. As a young woman, she took part in the Resistance movement in Vichy Algeria with her father Dr. Henri Samuel Aboulker and brother Jose Aboulker and, as a result, was awarded the Croix de Guerre in January 1948. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne as well as psychology with French psychotherapist Robert Desoille, becoming interested in mental imagery and dream imagery, which would become her life's work.
A practitioner of The Kabbalah of Light, in 1954 she moved to Jerusalem where she was honored with the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award in 1995, and authored five books about the healing power of mental and dream imagery.

Bonnie Lu Nettles (née Trousdale; August 29, 1927 – June 19, 1985), later known as Ti, was co-founder and co-leader with Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate new religious movement. Nettles died of melanoma metastatic to the liver in 1985 in Dallas, Texas, twelve years before the group's mass suicide in March 1997.

Esther (Etty) Hillesum (15 January 1914 – 30 November 1943) was a Dutch Jewish author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943, she was deported and murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was a Catholic Italian writer. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary who reported personal conversations with, and dictations from, Jesus Christ. She lived much of her life bedridden in Viareggio in Tuscany where she died in 1961. She is buried at the grand cloister of the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence.She is best known for her 5,000 page book The Poem of the Man-God, first published in 1956 and later titled The Gospel as Revealed to Me. The book is based on 10,000 of the 15,000 pages in her handwritten notebooks. The 10,000 pages were mostly written from 1944-1947 and detail the life of Jesus as an extended narrative of the gospels. These handwritten pages were typed on separate pages by her spiritual advisor, Father Romualdo Migliorini, O.S.M, and chronologically reassembled into a book. The additional 5,000 pages were later published as separate books.Her main book was placed on the (now abolished) Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1959, and has remained controversial since its publication. Various Biblical experts, historians and scientists continue to support and criticize the book to this day, and yearly conferences on the scientific and theological aspects of her writings are held in Italy.