Blavatsky
Original sense
A mahatma is a man (in her circle, specifically her teachers Morya and Koot Hoomi) who has evolved faculties the rest of humanity will reach only after long ages, and who still lives in a body, eats, writes letters, and dies. Gandhi later made the word a public honorific; she used it as a technical grade of adept.
A Mahatma is a personage who, by special training and education, has evolved those higher faculties… ordinary humanity will acquire [them] after passing through numberless series of reincarnations.
The Mahatma Letters present them as blunt, sometimes impatient men with a political and educational project, not as syrupy inner-plane sponsors. They refused to be worshipped.