A. P. Sinnett

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Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921) was an English journalist and one of the most influential early members of the Theosophical Society, the author whose books gave the movement’s teaching its first wide English readership. He edited The Pioneer, a prominent Anglo-Indian newspaper at Allahabad, when Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott arrived in India in 1879, and his interest in their claims drew him into the circle around them.

Sinnett came to that meeting already a working man of letters. Born in London on 18 January 1840 to a journalist father — who died when the boy was five — and a writing mother, he entered the trade at nineteen on the staff of the London Globe, then edited the Daily Press in Hong Kong before returning to England to write for the Standard. In 1872 George Allen, the proprietor of The Pioneer, offered him the editor’s chair at Allahabad, and Sinnett crossed to India to take one of the most prominent posts in Anglo-Indian journalism. He was, when the founders of Theosophy came east, exactly the kind of man the new Society most needed: respectable, fluent, established, with a daily paper at his command and the habits of a careful reporter. His wife Patience entered the movement beside him, and the Sinnetts’ household at Allahabad and Simla became, for a season, one of the chief stages on which the early Theosophical drama was played.

The phenomena and the correspondence

What made Sinnett’s name was correspondence. He held that he was receiving letters from two of the hidden adepts — the “Mahatmas” or “Masters” Koot Hoomi and Morya — whom Blavatsky said stood behind the Society, beings of advanced spiritual attainment living in seclusion in Tibet. He opened the exchange himself: in October 1880 he wrote to the elder Master Koot Hoomi, by way of Blavatsky, asking for a sign that would convince a skeptical public — and the adept, by his account, replied within days. The letters, often appearing by means he reported as paranormal — materializing inside locked cabinets, dropping from the air of a railway carriage, answering questions only just framed in his own mind — addressed the structure of the cosmos and the destiny of the soul. From them he drew the material of two books that would carry the teaching out of the founders’ circle and into the Victorian reading public.

The Occult World (1881) came first, and it was a journalist’s book: the chronicle of a correspondent assembling a case. In it Sinnett set down the phenomena he had witnessed, reproduced extracts from the Masters’ replies, and argued, in the level voice of a man accustomed to weighing evidence for print, that something real and lawful — not conjuring, not fraud — stood behind them. The book made the Mahatmas public property. Where Blavatsky’s own writing buried its claims in a vast, allusive sprawl, Sinnett offered a narrative a clubman could follow: here is what happened, here is what was said, here is why I believe it. The effect was to transfer the question of the Masters from the private testimony of an eccentric Russian to the printed witness of a known editor.

Esoteric Buddhism and the system

Esoteric Buddhism (1883) was the work that traveled. Drawn largely from the answers the Masters were said to have sent him, it set out, in the orderly prose of a Victorian man of letters rather than the dense weave of Blavatsky’s own pages, a complete cosmic scheme. The human being was built of seven principles, a graded ladder running from the physical body up through the vital and astral layers to the immortal spirit, and the higher of these survived death to be reborn. The soul climbed through long evolutionary cycles — the “rounds” and “races” — that carried life around a chain of seven globes, age upon age, with a restful interlude in a heaven-state, Devachan, between incarnations. Governing the whole ascent were the twin laws he placed at the center of the system: karma, the exact moral accounting of cause and consequence, and reincarnation, the soul’s return across many lives. For many English readers it was the first accessible statement of these ideas, and it shaped how a generation would picture the East.

The title was an act of branding, and a contested one. The system Esoteric Buddhism laid out owes little to Buddhism as practiced in any monastery of Ceylon, Tibet, or Japan — it knows nothing of the Four Noble Truths as a Buddhist would teach them, and its elaborate planetary chains and root-races have no counterpart in the Pali canon or the Mahayana sutras. Sinnett and his teachers used “Buddhism” loosely, glossing it as Budhism, the wisdom-religion, the hidden core they held common to all faiths rather than the historical Dharma. Scholars have noted the misleading fit ever since; what the title fixed, durably, was the public association between Theosophy and the religions of Asia. The connection ran the other way from what the word implied: not Buddhism dressed in esoteric robes, but a Western occult synthesis flying an Eastern flag.

The book’s reach is the measure of Sinnett’s importance. It is Esoteric Buddhism, far more than the founders’ own volumes, that put rounds and races, the sevenfold constitution, karma, and rebirth into general English circulation, and that set the template later systematizers — and later critics — would work from. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) would supersede it in scale and authority and would, in places, quietly correct it; but Sinnett’s compact statement got there first and reached furthest. He returned to the system through the rest of his life, expanding it in The Growth of the Soul (1896), the avowed sequel to his great success.

India, exile, and the London Lodge

The books cost Sinnett his profession. His open advocacy of the Theosophists in the columns of The Pioneer, together with his pronounced sympathy for Indian aspirations, did not sit well with the paper’s proprietors; in November 1882 he was told his services as editor were no longer required, and in 1883 he left the post and returned to England. The eleven Allahabad years had given him income, standing, and a comfortable Anglo-Indian life; he traded them for a place at the front of a new religious movement.

In London he became a central figure in the Society’s English work, and at once a partisan in its first great quarrel. The London Lodge he joined was led by Anna Kingsford, who with her collaborator Edward Maitland pressed a Western, Christian-Hermetic reading of the perennial wisdom against the Indian, “esoteric Buddhist” line that Sinnett embodied. The two orientations could not share a single lodge. Olcott, visiting London in 1884, found the tendencies irreconcilable and counseled Kingsford to form her own body, which she did, founding the Hermetic Society on 9 May 1884. In the reshuffle Sinnett served as vice-president and secretary under a compromise president, and by January 1885 he had been elected president of the London Lodge in his own right — the recognized head of Theosophy’s most important Western outpost and the chief expositor of its Eastern doctrine in the English-speaking world. The contest with Kingsford was not a clash of temperaments but of maps: whether the road to the hidden wisdom ran through Egypt, Greece, and a symbolic Christianity, or over the Himalayas to the Masters of Tibet.

The disputed letters

The letters themselves became the movement’s most disputed document. The bundle Sinnett preserved was edited by A. Trevor Barker and published after his death as The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (1923); the original manuscripts have been held since 1939 in the British Library, and the printed corpus remains a primary source for what the early Society taught — the raw matter from which both The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism were quarried. Whether the Masters were real, whether Blavatsky composed the letters herself, or whether something stranger occurred, was contested in his lifetime and is contested still. In 1885 the Society for Psychical Research, acting on accusations leveled by the Coulombs, former employees at the Adyar headquarters, dispatched the young investigator Richard Hodgson to Madras; his report to the Society returned the famous verdict that Blavatsky was one of the most accomplished and interesting impostors in history, and held the Mahatma letters to be her own composition in a disguised hand. The committee that endorsed it included the founding generation of British psychical research. Theosophists rejected the finding then and have contested it since, and a century later a forensic re-examination of Hodgson’s handwriting evidence by a professional document examiner, Vernon Harrison, faulted the report as methodologically unsound — a rebuttal the Society for Psychical Research itself came in time to acknowledge. The authorship question, by the nature of the evidence, was never settled; the academic literature has run from a documented charge of unattributed borrowing through a reading of the Masters as composite literary portraits of real Indian figures, without arriving at a verdict all sides accept.

Sinnett’s own place in the affair was double. He was the recipient whose testimony, more than anyone’s, had carried the phenomena to the public, and so the man whose credibility the Hodgson Report aimed to undo. Yet by the time the report appeared, the correspondence had already cooled — partly with Blavatsky’s declining health, partly with the strain the controversy put on his relations with her — and the letters effectively ceased in the mid-1880s.

Scholarship and the textual record {#scholarship}

The documentary core of the Sinnett episode survives in unusually complete form, and the dispute around it is itself a body of literature. The primary corpus runs from Sinnett’s two key books through the posthumous letter-collection to the investigators’ files.

• A. Trevor Barker, comp., The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett from the Mahatmas M. & K. H. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923) — the central documentary source, drawn from the bundle Sinnett kept; in the public domain since 2019, its manuscripts held in the British Library and its textual history surveyed in the entry on The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. Its companion, The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett (1925), prints the other side of the Adyar correspondence.
• Richard Hodgson et al., “Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the Theosophical Society,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. III (December 1885), pp. 201–400 — the investigation whose verdict the Society rejected; an overview with the report’s reception and its later reassessment is given in the SPR’s own Psi Encyclopedia article on the Hodgson Report.
• William Emmette Coleman, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings” (1895), the foundational source-critical study, printed as an appendix to Vsevolod Solovyoff’s A Modern Priestess of Isis — the starting point for every later academic account of the corpus on which Sinnett drew.
• For the wider picture, Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 1994) sets Sinnett and the Mahatma letters in the nineteenth-century occult milieu, and Peter Washington’s Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon (1993) narrates the movement’s English social history; K. Paul Johnson’s The Masters Revealed (SUNY Press, 1994) advances the composite-identification reading of Koot Hoomi and Morya. A study aid to the letter-corpus itself is the Theosophical Society in America’s introduction to The Mahatma Letters.

Sinnett’s own later books — The Growth of the Soul (1896), The Rationale of Mesmerism (1892), Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching, and the memoir The Early Days of Theosophy in Europe, issued posthumously in 1922 — extend the record and document the movement’s first English decades from the inside, with all the partisanship of a founder-witness.

The last decades

The Society Sinnett had helped build moved on without him. As W. Q. Judge’s American following grew and the leadership after Blavatsky’s death in 1891 passed to a generation that took the movement in directions he could not follow — toward the clairvoyant investigations and the messianic hopes of the new century — Sinnett drifted to its margins. He resigned from the Society in 1909 and gathered his circle into a body he called the Eleusinian Society, returning in 1911 to reconstitute the London Lodge once more; he held the office of vice-president of the Theosophical Society in his later years, an elder honored more than heeded. Through it all he kept up his own line of communication with unseen teachers, convinced to the end that he remained in touch with the very Masters whose existence the Society’s later chiefs had half-forgotten and the psychical researchers had pronounced a fraud.

He died in London on 26 June 1921. The two slim books he had made from a journalist’s correspondence had by then done their work: rounds and races, the sevenfold soul, karma and rebirth had passed into the common stock of English spiritual language, carried not by the genius who first sounded them but by the reporter who learned to write them plainly. Sinnett held to his belief in the Masters to the end of his life, and to a conviction that he remained in contact with them long after the damning verdict and long after his estrangement from the Society’s later leadership — convinced to the end that he remained in correspondence with the very Masters the Society’s later chiefs had half-forgotten and the psychical researchers had pronounced a fraud.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — The Key to Theosophy (1889) · Blavatsky — Isis Unveiled (1877) · Blavatsky — The Secret Doctrine (1888)

→ Related: Theosophy · Helena Blavatsky · Reincarnation · Karma · Theosophical Society · Henry Steel Olcott · W Q Judge · Buddhism